Happy New Year from the Dark Energy Survey!
We’re excited to share the 2017 edition of the DES calendar+!
Thank you to our DarkBites authors and illustrators*, mountain observers, and other DES members, for providing fantastic images to guide us through the year.
This year’s compilation of DES images and DarkBites is available for download here.
+Calendar created by Christina Krawiec
*DarkBites authors and illustrators: Daniel Nagasawa, Eric Suchyta, Chihway Chang, Jessie Muir, Ravi Gupta
A special New Year’s message from the DES director, Josh Frieman:
Dear DES Collaborators and Friends,
As 2016 draws to a close, I wish you all the best as you gather with friends, family, and colleagues to celebrate another great year for the Dark Energy Survey. A few scientific highlights of the past year (a very incomplete list): the collaboration completed weak lensing analyses of shear peak statistics, galaxy-galaxy lensing, voids, and cluster masses; constrained dark matter annihilation from Milky Way dwarfs with Fermi-LAT; detected the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect in concert with SPT; discovered new structures in the Milky Way; discovered and confirmed new lensed galaxies and QSOs plus a number of very high-redshift QSOs; discovered the 2nd most distant dwarf planet in the solar system; discovered the highest-redshift, spectroscopically confirmed supernova and has now accrued over 1000 photometrically classified type Ia supernovae with host-galaxy redshifts; and carried out the deepest, widest optical follow-up of the first gravitational wave events. The collaboration has by now submitted almost 90 papers for publication, including nearly 40 this year.
On the mountain, the camera and telescope have been operating with very high efficiency and reliability, the Y4 weather has been the best of the survey seasons so far, and we set new seeing (PSF FWHM) records for DES images with DECam.
Plus the Cubs won the World Series.
On the collaboration front, this year saw the start of the DES Ombudsperson positions, the birth of the Diversity & Inclusion Committee and of the DES Advisory Board, healthy rotation in the Science Committee, and a vigorous program of Education & Public Outreach activities.
As I’ve noted in the past, this progress is the direct result of all those who have worked in dedicated fashion for many years on the project—the instrument hardware and software, telescope, data management and testing, calibration, observing teams, simulations, survey planning and operations, science planning and analysis, EPO, etc.
Keep up the great work!