First Images Recorded by Dark Energy Camera Released

Posted on September 17, 2012

The first images recorded by the Dark Energy Camera have been released. The Dark Energy Camera is the world's most powerful digital camera. It was built by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and was mounted to the Blanco telescope at an observatory in Chile. The 570-megapixel camera is being used to unlock the mystery of dark energy. The camera can see light from over 100,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light years away in each snapshot.

The image above is the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365, in the Fornax cluster of galaxies, located about 60 million light years from Earth. You can see more of the first Dark Energy Camera images released here. You can find out more about the camera and the DES research project at darkenergysurvey.org.



More from Science Space & Robots