Late last Friday, on the first cloudy night in a week of clear weather, Dark Energy Survey science team member James Annis took time out from his role in the $35 million project’s commissioning to answer a few questions from the Blanco 4-meter telescope.
By night, the route up to the Blanco. atop Chile’s Cerro Tololo mountain, winds around some of the most desolate-looking stretches of two-lane blacktop imaginable.
Switchback after switchback finally leads to the telescope itself, where Annis, a Fermilab astrophysicist and colleagues, have been fine-tuning the attached digital camera that offers the next best hope in answering questions about the true nature of dark energy — responsible for the inexplicable accelerating expansion of the observable universe.