Check Out These Spellbinding Images From the Dark Energy Camera - Gizmodo

Over the last 10 years, the Dark Energy Camera alone has imaged about 2.5 billion objects, such as galaxies, stars, dwarf planets, and supernovae, the explosive deaths of stars.

The Dark Energy Camera is the 570-megapixel instrument that is key to the survey, but it also is used for separate observations from time to time, gathering light in visible and infrared wavelengths. Here are 15 images snapped by the camera that show off its remarkable vision.

It took the Dark Energy Camera over 11 hours of exposure to capture the vibrant light emanating from the galaxy.

The Dark Energy Camera imaged 10 deep fields several times, to capture faint light in the distant universe and better understand their distribution in three dimensions.

The Spanish Dancer (or spiral galaxy NGC 1566, though that doesn’t roll off the tongue) is a galaxy twirling about 69 million light-years from Earth.

The Little Sombrero Galaxy glows orange-red in this image by the Dark Energy Camera.

66.5 million light-years away and 66,000 light-years across, the galaxy is seen ‘edge-on’: from our perspective, we see across the galaxy’s width, rather than its spiraled face.

This breathtaking image shows Centaurus A, a galaxy 12 million light-years away.

The galaxy is obscured by the bands of dust between it and the Dark Energy Camera, which looks as if someone smeared paint across the sky.

(Physicists try to hone in on dark matter candidates based on their potential masses.) IC 1613 is about 2.4 million light-years away and is constituted by about 100 million stars, according to a Fermilab release

The Sculptor Galaxy is 11 million light-years away and is one of the 500 million-odd galaxies imaged by the Dark Energy Survey

The galaxy NGC 1465 in the Fornax cluster was one of the first objects imaged by the Dark Energy Camera a decade ago