The Dark Energy Camera is the worlds most powerful digital camera, “able to see light from over 100,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light years away in each snapshot.” The 570 megapixel Dark Energy Camera is the result of eight years of planning and construction by scientists, engineers, and technicians on three continents.
The camera is roughly the size of a telephone booth and was constructed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. The Dark Energy Camera has been mounted on the Victor M. Blanco telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) perched on a mountaintop in Chile. Astronomers and physicists will be using the camera to probe the mystery of dark energy, a force that is believed to be causing the universe to expand faster and faster.
