The DECam Provides Unprecedented Detail of the Milky Way
Back in January the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian published a news release about a massive astronomical survey captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, via kottke.org.
The first trove of data from DECaPS was released in 2017. With the addition of the new data, the survey now covers 6.5 percent of the night sky and spans a staggering 130-degrees in length. While it might sound modest, this equates to 13,000 times the angular area of the full Moon.
“When combined with images from Pan-STARRS 1, DECaPS2 completes a 360-degree panoramic view of the Milky Way’s disk and additionally reaches much fainter stars,” says Edward Schlafly, a researcher at the AURA-managed Space Telescope Science Institute and a co-author of the paper describing DECaPS2 published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement. “With this new survey, we can map the three-dimensional structure of the Milky Way’s stars and dust in unprecedented detail.”
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