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Showing posts from August, 2014

Sailing under the Magellanic Clouds: A DECam View of the Carina Dwarf

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Where did that month go? Winter is almost over and spring will be breaking, and my backlog of papers to comment on is getting longer and longer. So a quick post this morning on a recent cool paper by PhD student, Brendan McMonigal , called "Sailing under the Magellanic Clouds: A DECAm View of the Carina Dwarf". The title tells a lot of the story, but it all starts with a telescope with a big camera. The camera is DECam , the Dark Energy Camera located on the 4m CTIO telescope in Chile. This is what it looks like; It's not one CCD , but loads of them butted together allowing us to image a large chunk of sky. Over the next few years, this amazing camera will allow the Dark Energy Survey  which will hopefully reveal what is going on in the dark sector of the Universe , a place where Australia will play a key-role through OzDES . But one of the cool things is that we can use this superb facility to look at other things, and this is precisely what Bendan did