Giant camera turns its red-seeking eye on the darkness

(Image: Reidar Hahn)

This explosion of colour is an assault on the eyeballs ? but the device in the centre is designed to look for darkness.

The Dark Energy Camera (DECam), seen here being assembled at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, is now installed at the Blanco Telescope in Chile.

It captures light that has been stretched to higher wavelengths by the accelerating expansion of the universe, which is believed to be caused by a mysterious entity known as dark energy. Cosmologists hope that studying the extent of this stretching, known as redshifting, will teach them more about the true nature of dark energy.

DECam captures 570 megapixel images, about 100 times higher resolution than those taken by a typical smartphone, but the camera also has a wide view. A single image records an area of the sky 20 times larger than the moon as seen from Earth.

That's not the only difference between DECam and more down-to-earth snappers.

Cylindrical controls called hexapods, which you can see sitting roughly in the middle of the camera, constantly tweak the camera's focus to ensure a high image quality. The black box just to their left is a cartridge of swappable filters that let different wavelengths through.

Perhaps the only thing DECam can't do is upload its snaps to Facebook in a single click.

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