How the largest digital camera ever made is revolutionizing our view of space

Ten areas in the sky were selected as “deep fields” that the Dark Energy Camera imaged several times during the survey, providing a glimpse of distant galaxies and helping determine their 3D distribution in the cosmos. The image is teeming with galaxies — in fact, nearly every single object in this image is a galaxy.

Last Thursday, I took my son to the Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York’s Museum of Natural History. In the Hayden Planetarium, we watched a simulation of the Milky Way bloom above us, while the actor Pedro Pascal — who truly is everywhere — narrated the galactic dance unfolding on the screen.

It was breathtaking. But it didn’t compare to what was blasted around the world just a few days later, as the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory began broadcasting its “first light” — its inaugural images of the cosmos. I found myself pinching-to-zoom through a picture that contains roughly 10 million galaxies in a single frame, a vista so vast it would take 400 4-K TVs to display at full resolution. I could hold the universe itself on my screen.

Eye on the sky

Perched 8,660 feet up Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes, where the crystal-clear nights provide........

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