Galaxy Cluster Abell 3158 | DESI Legacy Imaging Survey | NOIRLab

Galaxy Cluster Abell 3158 | DESI Legacy Imaging Survey | NOIRLab

This is an image centered on a relatively nearby galaxy cluster dubbed Abell 3158; light from these galaxies had a redshift value of 0.059, meaning that it traveled approximately 825 million years on its journey to Earth. The image is a small part of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys—a monumental six-year survey covering nearly half the sky.

The largest two-dimensional map of the sky ever made has grown even larger with the tenth data release from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys—a monumental six-year survey covering nearly half the sky. This new data release adds increased sky and wavelength coverage to the already completed surveys made with data from the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

The Universe is teeming with galaxies, each brimming with billions of stars. Though all galaxies shine brightly, many are cloaked in dust while others are so distant that to observers on Earth they appear as little more than faint smudges. By creating comprehensive maps of even the dimmest and most-distant galaxies, astronomers are better able to study the structure of the Universe and unravel the mysterious properties of dark matter and dark energy. The largest such map to date has just grown even larger, with the tenth data release from the DOE’s Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Survey. 

The DESI Legacy Imaging Survey expands on the data included in two earlier companion surveys: the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) Legacy Survey and the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey. Jointly these three surveys imaged 14,000 square degrees of the sky visible from the northern hemisphere using telescopes at NSF’s NOIRLab’s Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. 

This ambitious six-year effort involved three telescopes, one petabyte (1000 trillion bytes) of data, and 100 million CPU hours on one of the world’s most powerful computers at the US Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. 

Credit: DESI Legacy Imaging Survey/KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)

Release Date: Feb. 23, 2023

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