THE DARK ENERGY CAMERA

By B. Flaugher, H. Diehl, K. Honscheid, T. Abbott, O. Alvarez, R. Angstadt, James Annis, M. Antonik, O. Ballester, L. Beaufore and 108 more. The Dark Energy Survey, 2004

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The Dark Energy Camera is a new imager with a 2.°2 diameter field of view mounted at the prime focus of the Victor M. Blanco 4 m telescope on Cerro Tololo near La Serena, Chile. The camera was designed and constructed by the Dark Energy Survey Collaboration and meets or exceeds the stringent requirements designed for the wide-field and supernova surveys for which the collaboration uses it. The camera consists of a five-element optical corrector, seven filters, a shutter with a 60 cm aperture, and a charge-coupled device (CCD) focal plane of 250 μm thick fully depleted CCDs cooled inside a vacuum Dewar. The 570 megapixel focal plane comprises 62 2k × 4k CCDs for imaging and 12 2k × 2k CCDs for guiding and focus. The CCDs have 15 μm × 15 μm pixels with a plate scale of 0.″263 pixel−1. A hexapod system provides state-of-the-art focus and alignment capability. The camera is read out in 20 s with 6–9 electron readout noise. This paper provides a technical description of the camera's engineering, construction, installation, and current status.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9aec70b1690b5932d9741e9f2b9b64311a033992

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Citations in the corpus

Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: weak lensing shape catalogues (2017, methodology): “The Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year One (Y1) catalogues described here are based on observations taken using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam, Flaugher et al. 2015) on the Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory during the first full season of DES operations.”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: redshift distributions of the weak-lensing source galaxies (2017, methodology): “Estimation and validation of the binning and ni(z) functions for the Y1 source galaxies require input photometry for these galaxies of course, but also Dark Energy Camera (DECam, Flaugher et al. 2015) data (Sánchez et al. 2014) and external data on the COSMOS field used for validation.”
The DESI Bright Galaxy Survey: Final Target Selection, Design, and Validation (2022, methodology): “Lastly, DECaLS observed g-, r-, and z-band photometry over the rest of the LS footprint using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam; Flaugher et al. 2015) on the 4m Blanco telescope.”
The Dark Energy Survey: Data Release 1 (2018, methodology): “A total of 59.5 of the 62 science CCDs in the DECam focal plane have been fully operational during the DR1 data collection period.”
Data Release 1 of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (2025, positive): “Also included in this VAC is the stellar catalog containing the per-star reddening measurements in the Dark Energy Camera ( DECam; B. Flaugher et al. 2015 ) filters as well as other properties from the DESI pipeline and the imaging catalogs.”
Validation of the Scientific Program for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (2023, methodology): “DECaLS imaging in the grz filters was collected in a three-pass observing strategy using the Dark Energy Camera (DE-Cam; Flaugher et al. 2015) at the 4-m Blanco telescope.”
Milky Way Satellite Census. I. The Observational Selection Function for Milky Way Satellites in DES Y3 and Pan-STARRS DR1 (2019, methodology): “DES Y3A2 DES is a broadband optical/near-infrared imaging survey of the southern Galactic cap using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam; Flaugher et al. 2015) mounted at the prime focus of the 4-m Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO).”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: measurement of the baryon acoustic oscillation scale in the distribution of galaxies to redshift 1 (2017, methodology): “‘DES Year 1’ (Y1) data were obtained in the period of time between 2013 August 31 and 2014 February 9 using the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam; Flaugher et al. 2015).”
Target Selection and Validation of DESI Emission Line Galaxies (2022, methodology): “The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys consist of three individual and complementary projects: the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), the Beijing–Arizona Sky Survey (BASS), and the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS).”
KiDS+VIKING-450: Cosmic shear tomography with optical and infrared data (2018, background): “The Dark Energy Survey (DES; Flaugher et al. 2015) as well as the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) Wide Survey (Aihara et al. 2018) have recently reached a statistical power that surpasses the measurement by H17.”