Overview
- The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys released a 5.6 trillion‑pixel, two‑dimensional map that catalogs almost four billion stars, galaxies and other objects across roughly 75% of the sky.
- More than 160 scientists stitched together 263,407 telescope exposures taken over about 13 years to produce the final dataset.
- The map is available through the Legacy Imaging Viewer so astronomers and citizen scientists can inspect images, find targets and hunt for phenomena such as gravitational lenses and faint galaxies.
- The imaging underpins the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which finished its five‑year spectroscopic campaign ahead of schedule and observed over 47 million galaxies and quasars for redshift and expansion studies.
- Early DESI analyses from the first three years have flagged a possible time‑varying dark energy signal but the collaboration and the wider community say that result is preliminary and requires further analysis and independent confirmation.