Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
This image, which is brimming with stars and dark dust clouds, is a small extract — a mere pinprick — of the full Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.