Welcome to the Darkness
On a dark mountain-top, a car’s brake lights redden the dome of a telescope. Behind it, stars appear to drift by as the Earth slowly turns. The telescope inside that dome, however, is looking farther and deeper into the universe than those nearby bright stars. Commanded by a veritable army of astronomers, our new camera is looking for evidence of the strangest stuff in the universe, dark energy. Our mission is called the Dark Energy Survey.
What is the Dark Energy Survey? It’s a cooperative effort between about 200 scientists at more than 25 institutions around the world. Together, we’ve designed and built the Dark Energy Camera, the most powerful unclassified digital imaging device in the world, and we’ve mounted it on the 4-meter Victor M. Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
Over the next five years, we’re going to use this camera to measure hundreds of millions of galaxies and thousands of supernovae in an effort to understand dark energy. That’s the name given to the mysterious substance that is causing our universe to expand faster and faster. We’re going to map a portion of the southern sky in unprecedented detail in order to study this accelerating expansion.
And along the way, we’re going to take some beautiful pictures, and we’re going to share them with you here every week.
We’ll start with this composite photo of the dome that houses the Blanco telescope. This image was made by taking multiple 30-second exposures over several hours, then combining all the images of the sky with a single image of the dome. The red glow was caused by brake lights on the road in front of the dome. The center of the arcs of light in the sky is the South Pole – it’s fixed in space, and the Earth rotates around it.
We can also see some multi-colored dashed arcs of light, moving in different directions. Those were caused by airplanes.
Dark Energy Detectives 