Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2021

45 ASTRO PUBLISHING designed specifically for DES. It was funded by the Department of En- ergy (DOE) and was built and tested at DOE’s Fermilab. Over the course of six years, from 2013 to 2019, DES used 30% of the time on the Blanco Telescope and surveyed 5,000 square degrees — al- most one-eighth of the entire sky — in 758 nights of observation, cata- loging hundreds of millions of ob- jects. The results of the survey draw on data from the first three years — survey, the Dark Energy Camera has been a popular choice for commu- nity and Chilean astronomers.” At present the Dark Energy Camera is used for programs covering a huge range of science including cos- mology. The Dark Energy Camera science archive, including DES Data Release 2 on which these results are based, is curated by the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. CSDC provides software systems, user serv- 226 million galaxies observed over 345 nights — to create the largest and most precise maps yet of the dis- tribution of galaxies in the Universe at relatively recent epochs. The DES data were processed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applica- tions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “NOIRLab is a proud host for and member of the DES collaboration,” said Steve Heathcote, CTIO Associate Director. “Both during and after the