DECam’s nearby discoveries

"The Dark Energy Camera does more than its name would lead you to believe."

The Dark Energy Camera, or DECam, peers deep into space from its mount on the 4-meter Victor Blanco Telescope high in the Chilean Andes.
Thirty percent of the camera’s observing time—about 105 nights per year—go to the team that built it: scientists working on the Dark Energy Survey.
Another small percentage of the year is spent on maintenance and upgrades to the telescope. So who else gets to use DECam? Dozens of other projects share its remaining time.
Many of them study objects far across the cosmos, but five of them investigate ones closer to home.
Overall, these five groups take up just 20 percent of the available time, but they’ve already taught us some interesting things about our planetary neighborhood and promise to tell us more in the future.

See the whole article by Liz Kruesi of Symmetry Magazine (Fermilab/SLAC Publications)