Dark energy camera unveils unprecedented view of Milky Way

A team of Harvard University astronomers, led by Andrew Saydjari, have employed a cutting-edge telescope instrument, the Dark Energy Camera, to capture an incredibly detailed image of the Milky Way galaxy.

The image, which spans just 6.5% of the night sky, boasts an impressive 3.32 billion individual stars, each one visible as a separate point of light.

This marks the largest catalog of stars ever assembled using just one camera, and a significant breakthrough in the field of astronomy.

The Dark Energy Camera, originally built for the Dark Energy Survey, a project that measured the expansion of the universe between 2013 and 2019, was used to take 12,400 photos in both visible and infrared light using a telescope located in Chile.

The camera’s near-infrared capabilities allowed the team to see through the clouds of dust that often obscure our view of the stars.

However, even with this advanced technology, capturing such a detailed image of the Milky Way was a challenging task.

The galaxy’s disk is so full of stars that they often overlap in photographs, making it difficult to distinguish one star from another.

But the team persevered, using a data processing program that helped predict the background behind each star, making it easier to separate one star from another.