Speaker
Tesla Jeltema
(University of California, Santa Cruz)
Description
During fall 2012 the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration
installed and commissioned DECam, a 570 mega-pixel optical and
near-infrared camera with a large 3 sq. deg. field of view,
set at the prime focus of the 4-meter Blanco telescope in
CTIO, Chile. In the course of the next five years DECam will
map an entire octant of the southern sky to unprecedented
depth, measuring the position on the sky, redshift and shape
of over 200 million galaxies, together with thousands of
galaxy clusters and supernovae. With this data set, DES will
study the properties of dark energy using four main probes:
galaxy clustering on large scales, weak gravitational lensing,
galaxy-cluster abundance, and supernova distances.
A "Science Verification" (SV) period of observations, lasting
until late February 2013, followed the DECam commissioning
phase, and provided science-quality images for over 150 sq.
deg. at the nominal depth of the survey. The talk will present
the first results from the SV observations, and will summarize
the plans and goals for the upcoming years.
Primary author
Tesla Jeltema
(University of California, Santa Cruz)
