Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI)

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Contreras Fire Threatens DESI and Kitt Peak National Observatory

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Angela Berti, University of Utah
June 29, 2022

On Saturday, June 11 a lightning strike started a wildfire in the Arizona mountains less than ten miles from the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), where DESI observing is done with the Mayall 4-meter telescope. Besides the Mayall, Kitt Peak is home to over 20 telescopes and other buildings that support scientific observations on the mountain, including dormitories where staff sleep. All of these structures were potentially threatened by the wildfire.

By Tuesday, June 14 the wildfire (now called the Contreras fire) had spread to thousands of acres and was less than five miles from Kitt Peak. Around noon local time KPNO safety staff and the fire Incident Commander told everyone on site to immediately prepare to evacuate the mountain. Observing would have to be put on hold. The night of June 13 would be DESI’s final look at the sky for at least several weeks. Within hours a convoy was organized and began to bring those at the summit down the mountain to safety. A skeleton crew of four remained at the summit overnight for full-time fire watch.

On Wednesday, June 15 about 15 firefighters were at KPNO clearing defensive space around observatory buildings. Eight NOIRLab staff were also allowed to return for a few hours to protect critical equipment. This included taping plastic sheets and tarps over DESI’s prime focus corrector and the Mayall telescope’s primary mirror. These sensitive components could be damaged by smoke and ash should the fire get too close.

Plastic sheeting taped over DESI’s prime focus corrector. Credit: Bob Stupak

Nearly 200 firefighters were by then battling the Contreras fire, which was now only three miles away to the south. By the evening at least seven large air tankers were dropping fire retardant near KPNO.

The fire was just two miles away by the morning of June 16. Firefighting teams dropped over 100 loads of fire retardant along the perimeter of the observatory, and local news reported that the Contreras fire was the “#1 priority to wildland fire in the entire United States” due to the value of KPNO.

By early morning on Friday, June 17, the fire swept over the Southwest Ridge section of the observatory, home to MDM Observatory (two optical telescopes), the Arizona Radio Observatory, and the NRAO Very Long Baseline Array radio dish. KPNO webcams mounted on some of the telescopes stopped returning images not long after as the fire disrupted electricity and internet service on the mountain. DESI collaborators around the world could no longer monitor instruments remotely due to the loss of connectivity.

The view of Kitt Peak National Observatory on the morning of June 17 from a camera mounted on the exterior of the Mayall telescope.
Credit: Clara Delabrouille

Good news finally came around midday on June 17 as light rain began to fall in nearby Tucson, Arizona. In the afternoon word came from two employees of NOIRLab who were on the mountain assisting firefighters with KPNO’s water system that no fire had reached the Mayall telescope. By the time the Contreras fire was 100% contained it had spread to nearly 30,000 acres. The fire destroyed four “non-scientific” structures, but none of the more than 20 telescopes atop Kitt Peak were burned!

On Tuesday, June 21, the DESI collaboration gathered in Berkeley, California for its first in-person meeting since 2019 due to the covid-19 pandemic. Many collaboration members who couldn’t be there in person joined remotely, and everyone expressed their gratitude for the incredible firefighters who saved DESI and KPNO from the Contreras fire.

One Year and 12.8 Million Galaxy Redshifts

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David Schlegel, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
May 14, 2022

In its first year of survey operations, DESI has dwarfed all prior redshifts surveys by mapping 12.8 million unique galaxies and quasars. One-quarter of those are at redshifts greater than 1.0.

Exactly one year ago, DESI began its five-year survey with over 100 DESI scientists on Zoom to witness the event. Although the instrument had been demonstrated to deliver science-quality data, this was not yet a smooth operation. At least a few scientists and engineers would join the observing staff each night to trouble-shoot problems with the telescope, the robotic focal plane, the guide cameras, the spectrographs, the CCD detectors, the cooling systems, or the control systems.

As the nights and weeks progressed, problems that would interrupt observations were identified and fixed. A 72-night shutdown starting July 11, 2021, serviced and replaced components of the robotic focal plane. The return-to-survey-operations on September 21 switched to our current nightly staffing model of an on-site Telescope Operator, an on-site Lead Observer, and two remote Support Observing Operators (who split the night). Only rarely are instrument experts still called in the middle of the night to trouble-shoot problems.

The observing efficiency has greatly improved from those first few nights of the survey. We routinely achieve 90% open-shutter time, defined as the time when the spectrograph shutters are open and collecting light from galaxies. The other 10% of the time is spent slewing the telescope to the next field, reading out the CCD detectors and re-configuring the focal plane (with various steps choreographed to occur concurrently). To date, the record open-shutter time was 10 hours 35 minutes on the long winter night of December 7, 2021.

During this first year, survey data has been collected on 242 nights. Of the remaining nights, 72 were for the maintenance shut-down, and only 51 were completely lost to weather or other engineering tasks. 2462 Main Survey DARK tiles and 2073 BRIGHT tiles have been observed. The raw data are transferred to the NERSC supercomputing center as they are collected, and are fully-reduced to calibrated spectra and redshifts by 10 AM the following morning. To date, the galaxy and quasar map consists of 12.8 million unique, reliable redshifts. In addition, 3.6 million unique stars have been observed. The number of redshifts is plotted as a function of time below.

The number of unique galaxies and quasars (top curve) and unique stars (bottom curve) with confidently-determined redshifts as a function of time. The first year of survey operations from May 14, 2021, through May 13, 2022, has delivered 12.8 million and 3.6 million such redshifts, respectively. (Anand Raichoor)

These next two figures show the distribution of observations on the sky. The survey began by observing non-overlapping tiles on the sky. Starting in September 2021, overlapping tiles were being observed that bring the typical number of visits of each patch of the sky to 5 for the DARK survey and 3 for the BRIGHT survey. Currently, prioritization is given to observing near the equator (declination 0), with diversions elsewhere to avoid pointing within 50 degrees of the moon or in the direction of the wind  windy nights. At Kitt Peak, the strongest winds are typically from the south, which has driven some observing to declinations > 32 degrees to avoid telescope wind shake. The DARK survey has observed 9500 square degrees (of a 14,000 square degree footprint) with at least one visit, with approximately 1300 square degrees fully completed with multiple visits.

DESI on a T-shirt (and stickers of course!)

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Claire Lamman, Harvard University
February 28, 2022

We all know the recipe for a great scientific collaboration: novel technology, topical science goals, and cool stickers.

In November 2021 we achieved the final ingredient with the launch of our official DESI Swag Shop.

The DESI shop is hosted on the third-party site Redbubble. This is a place for independent artists to sell their designs on a variety of products—everything from t-shirts to shower curtains. While not specifically designed for organizations to distribute swag, it is a convenient way to make a large selection of items easily available to individuals around the world. We set our shop settings to 0% profit margin—which means DESI makes no money and the prices are as low as possible.

In honor of the opening of our online shop, I made a special DESI-gn that highlights both the science and instrumentation parts of our collaboration. “Dark Energy” is represented by a map of large-scale structure, and “Spectroscopic Instrument” is represented by our focal plane and its 5,000 robotic positioners.

Four months later, 486 items have been purchased from our shop. The most popular are:

  1. DESI Logo sticker
  2. DESI Plane sticker
  3. DESI Logo magnet
  4. DESI Plane t-shirt
  5. M31 Focal Plane sticker

Beyond stickers and t-shirts the shop also has masks, mugs, puzzles, posters, and even socks. Here’s a look at how the popularity of these items compare:

Stats like this may be helpful for conference organizers deciding what types of merch products to use. The key takeaway here: never forget the stickers!

Selecting Targets for the DESI Survey

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Edmond Chaussidon, CEA Saclay
January 12, 2022

Although DESI will be able to collect 5,000 spectra simultaneously, galaxies are still too numerous to be all observed during the next five years of observation. Target Selection (TS) is a crucial step to identify which objects to observe during the spectroscopic survey.

To constrain the cosmic expansion history through measurements of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, DESI probes the matter in the Universe with four different tracers:

  • Bright galaxies (BGS) in the redshift (z) range 0.05 < z < 0.4
  • Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG) for 0.4 < z < 1.0
  • Emission Line Galaxies (ELG) for 0.6 < z < 1.6
  • Quasars (QSO) for 0.9 < z < 2.1

Quasars will also probe the Universe at higher redshift (z > 2.1) through Lyman-alpha forest studies measuring the light absorption by the gas in front of quasars.

Easy to say that we want to select different galaxy types, but how? The main information we need are the galaxy colors, which we can determine thanks to the measurements provided by photometric surveys. We used the catalogs of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, a program conducted over more than 14,000 square degrees of sky from the Northern hemisphere, in three optical bands: g (in the blue-green), r (in the red), and z (in the red/near-infrared, and not to be confused with redshift!). The data were collected via three independent programs:

  • The Beijing–Arizona Sky Survey (BASS) observed ∼5,100 square degrees of the North Galactic Cap (NGC) in g and r using the 2.3-meter Bok Telescope.
  • The Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS) provided z-band observations over the same footprint as BASS using the 4-meter Mayall Telescope.
  • The Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS) was performed with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the 4-meter Blanco Telescope. DECaLS observed the bulk of the Legacy Imaging Surveys footprint in g, r, and z.

These optical data were complemented by two infrared bands from the all-sky data of the WISE satellite, namely: W1 (3.4 μm) and W2 (4.6 μm).

The selection of the BGSs, LRGs and ELGs was mostly done based on conditions on the source colors. For the QSOs, however, which are harder to select because their colors are quite similar to those of the overwhelming stellar background, we developed a more complex approach based on machine learning. To further reduce the contamination of the sample from unwanted stars or galaxies, we applied an additional constraint on source magnitude. All these conditions were tuned on previous spectroscopic samples as those from the BOSS/eBOSS program. But of course, we also intensively tested them during the Survey Validation (SV) phases emulating a nominal observation with DESI. Voilà! Lo and behold, they all give very satisfying results.

DESI is now on sky, observing every night the quasars and the galaxies that we selected using these algorithms, on its way to build the largest 3D map of the Universe to date!

The Target Selection and Survey Validation steps are described in great detail in the upcoming eight scientific papers (one Overview, two for the SV, four for the TS and one for the Milky Way Survey). Pipeline and algorithms for data reductions and operations will be described in another set of five scientific papers later. So, stay tuned!

For the curious, below are more details on how we proceed for the four classes of targets, and some information about the density of objects we thus select.

Bright Galaxy Target Selection

Star–galaxy separation in BGS is performed using a GGaia – rraw cut. This criterion exploits the fact that the Gaia magnitude is measured with an aperture of a space-based point-spread function (PSF) while the Legacy Imaging Surveys magnitude captures the light from the entire source. This cut separates point sources (stars) from extended sources (galaxies). This selection will observe ~850 targets per square degree. (See Hahn et al., in prep.)

Luminous Red Galaxy Target Selection

LRG selection is done by the cut (red line) in the (r – z) – (z – W1) space. This selection uses the W1 infrared band to separate galaxies (color points) from stars (grey points). The different colors show the redshift of the galaxies in the color–color space. This selection will observe ~615 targets per square degree. (See Zou et al., in prep.)

Emission Line Galaxy Target Selection

To avoid stellar contamination (black smooth line) in the target selection, ELG selection uses a cut in (r – z) – (g – r) space. The color histogram is the redshift distribution of ELGs in the color space. This selection will observe ~2,387 targets per square degree. (See Raichoor et al., in prep.)

Quasar Target Selection

Only point sources are considered during the selection and the target selection aims to separate quasars from stars. However, the separation between these two classes is less obvious than in the previous cases. A more sophisticated selection has to be applied. Quasars are selected via a Random Forest classification instead of the classical color cuts selection done in previous spectroscopic surveys. The idea of the selection is to separate quasars from stars based on the “infrared excess” of QSOs. The stellar locus is illustrated by the red line and the quasars by the blue/green/yellow points. This selection will observe ~308 targets per square degree. (See Chaussidon et al., in prep.)

The Old is New Again: Social Distancing While Mapping the Universe

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David Lee Summers, Kitt Peak National Observatory
November 17, 2021

Many people who hear the word “astronomer” imagine a scientist spending long nights in an observatory dome peering through a telescope’s eyepiece. In fact, when the Nicholas U. Mayall telescope was commissioned in 1973, astronomers could sit at the telescope’s focus to operate the cameras. In those early days, the telescope operator worked at an analog console in a control room inside the dome. Over the years those telescope controls migrated to computers and the astronomers joined the telescope operators in the control room.

The original Mayall control room.

The control room is a cozy space. It’s a long, narrow room. The old analog console dominates one wall. Desks and shelves line the other walls. The closest restroom is two floors below the control room and the control room didn’t even have a sink until one was installed circa 2010. A small microwave allowed the operator and observers to heat their night lunches. When planning for the DESI survey began, people soon realized this space was far too small for the number of scientists who would need to collaborate on a given night while commissioning the instrument. Even during regular observing, it was expected that three or four people would need to be in the control room at the same time.

A new, larger space within the Mayall building was identified to serve as the control room. A former recreation room on the so-called Utility floor was renovated into a modern control room in 2017. Even before DESI operations began, we moved into the new control room to finish the Mosaic Z-band Legacy Survey. The new control room allowed several scientists to collaborate during the night. There was plenty of desk space for computers and monitors to watch all the telescope and DESI functions. An adjoining room held a small kitchenette and a meeting room. What’s more, restrooms were only one room further on. The U-floor control room seemed a vast improvement as a practical workspace—at least until the unexpected happened and operations had to be stopped in March 2020 for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The utility floor Mayall control room, circa 2018.

Although we paused on-sky DESI commissioning, much thought was given to safe operations. Clearly we couldn’t have several people working together in one enclosed room, especially in the days before a vaccine had been developed and before the effectiveness of masks had been demonstrated.

Before the DESI installation began, some astronomers who used Kitt Peak facilities already observed remotely from their home institutions. They could log in and control an instrument through the internet and communicate with the telescope operator through video conferencing software. This idea became the core for new, safe DESI operations. The telescope operator would return to the old control room next to the telescope. A lead DESI observer would work in the new U-floor control room. All other collaborators would work either from home or their home institutions and communicate with the team at the telescope over Zoom.

As an operator who has worked at Kitt Peak since the 1990s, it’s been gratifying to watch DESI’s development and see this next step in the Mayall Telescope’s illustrious history. It’s also been gratifying to see how elements of the telescope’s legacy along with new technology have kept us operating through these challenging times.

Congratulations to Frank Valdes

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Adam Bolton, NOIRLab
November 1, 2021

DESI collaborator Dr. Frank Valdes, a scientist at NSF’s NOIRLab, has been honored with the 2021 ADASS Prize for an Outstanding Contribution to Astronomical Software. The award recognizes Frank and two other colleagues for their foundational roles in creating the Image Reduction and Analysis Facility (IRAF) software system. IRAF was launched over three decades ago as a pioneering project to create general-purpose software tools that would allow astronomers to translate the images taken by telescopes into calibrated data products suitable for quantitative scientific analysis. In the years since its initial release, IRAF has been used in nearly 25,000 scientific publications. Most significantly for DESI, all the images collected by the Legacy Surveys (DECaLS, MzLS, and BASS) to enable DESI’s spectroscopic target selection were processed through an IRAF-based pipeline created by Frank and operated by him and other NOIRLab staff members. The DESI Collaboration congratulates Frank on this well-deserved recognition!

This mosaic of the standard IRAF test image (M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy), found in every IRAF installation, is composed of plots and images taken from the more than 25,000 refereed papers published since 1986 that mention using IRAF.

DESI Breaking Records

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David Schlegel, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
October 13, 2021

DESI has broken its own records, mapping the three-dimensional location of 100,000 distant galaxies and quasars in the single night of October 8, 2021.

The DESI Main Survey started on the evening of May 14, 2021. Nearly 100 scientists joined the operations team on Zoom that night to witness the beginning of the survey. It wasn’t a perfect night, as the “seeing” (blurring of the sky from atmospheric turbulence) was worse than typical, and some time was lost to instrument communication errors. Even still, eight dark-time tiles and ten bright-time tiles were observed, which was enough to set a record (for any telescope) of mapping 60,000 galaxies in a single night.

The operational efficiency of DESI has been improved since that first night. One important aspect of this is the “robustness” of the complex instrument and control systems. There are 5000 fiber robots on the top end of the telescope commanded to move every 15 minutes, 6 guide cameras, 4 optical wavefront sensors, 30 cryogenic cameras taking data in the spectrograph room, a large assortment of sensors, and dozens of computers to control all these systems. It’s not uncommon to have minor, non-critical faults somewhere in the system, and those faults have to be trapped rather than bring the whole system to a halt.

Operational efficiency also relies upon a careful choreography of reconfiguring the instrument between observations: the telescope is slewed to its next sky location, the focal plane is re-focused as the 375 tons of moving weight slightly sags under gravity, the 5000 fiber robots are re-positioned to point to the locations of unobserved galaxies, and the previous spectroscopic exposure is read out. The inter-exposure time for this dance of activities that was typically 3 minutes during the first night of the survey has been reduced to 2 min 15 sec. For this particular record-setting night, the open-shutter efficiency was 87%, meaning that’s the fraction of time that the shutters on the spectrographs were open and integrating on light from distant galaxies.

Finally, the weather needs to cooperate! The night of October 8th was a fully “dark” night, meaning that the moon was below the horizon. The skies were clear (“photometric”) for all but a few minutes when a thin cloud layer blew through. And the “seeing” was excellent, such that the blurring of the atmosphere was less than 1 arcsecond for most of the night. The sky wasn’t quite as dark as the best nights, partly because we were observing near the ecliptic plane where dust particles in the solar system reflect small amounts of light from the sun. In combination, the weather was sufficiently good that we were running at a survey speed of 120%—meaning 20% faster than expected under nominal, good conditions.

The night sky as seen from the Kitt Peak all-sky camera on the night of October 8, 2021. It was a dark, clear night, with the Milky Way passing overhead early in the night.

How many galaxies were mapped in this one night? We completed observations on 29 dark-time tiles (with one tile completing observations from a previous night). Each of those tiles included approximately 4200 high-redshift targets (galaxies or quasars), with the remaining 800 fibers assigned to calibration targets. Most of those galaxies were “redshifted” (mapped) in a single observation. These data were analyzed by 10 am the following morning on NERSC (the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center) to confirm reliable redshifts for 98,954 galaxies and quasars. Additionally, two bright-time tiles observed during evening twilight measured redshifts for 4225 low-redshift galaxies, bringing the total haul to 103,179 galaxies and quasars.

Will this record be broken in the future? Most assuredly, if only because the nights are getting longer. This record-setting night had 9 hours 22 min of time between astronomical twilight (when the sky is darkest with the sun at least 18 degrees below the horizon). The best nights for setting records will be the new moons closest to the winter solstice. This year, that will be the nights of December 3 (10 hours, 57 minutes) and January 1, 2022 (10 hours, 59 minutes).

Congratulations to the observing team for the night of October 8, 2021: Liz Buckley-Geer (Fermilab, Lead Observer), Abby Bault (University of California Irvine, Support Observer), Mike Wang (University of Edinburgh, Support Observer) and Thaxton Smith (NOIRLab, Observing Assistant).

The DESI peculiar velocity survey

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Christoph Saulder, Postdoc at KASI
October 11, 2021

While the main goal of DESI is to obtain spectroscopic redshifts for millions of galaxies to map the expansion history of the universe, there are also secondary targeting programs that supplement the main DESI survey and its science goals. The DESI peculiar velocity survey is one of these programs and it aims to improve the measurements of cosmological parameters in the local universe.

And yet it moves…
Even when accounting for the expansion of the universe (“Hubble flow”), galaxies do not sit around idly, but move around due to their mutual gravitational interactions. These proper motions, which are refereed to as peculiar velocities in our context, encode information about distribution of matter. By default, DESI measures the redshifts of galaxies, which are a combination of the cosmological redshifts caused by the expansion of the universe and the redshifts caused by peculiar motions. As the cosmological redshifts correlate with the distances to these galaxies, one can use redshift-independent distance indicators in combination with the redshift measurements to obtain the (radial) peculiar velocities of these galaxies. As we want to measure the peculiar velocities for a large number of sample, we cannot wait for a rare supernova type Ia to go off in each of them and most of them are too far away for us to resolve any Cepheids variable stars. We therefore have to rely on less precise, but more easily accessible redshift-independent distance indicators, such as galaxy scaling relations, in particular the fundamental plane and the Tully-Fisher relation. These allow us to measure the distances, and thereby the peculiar velocities, to a large number of galaxies in the local universe (redshift of less than 0.1).

Still waters run deep…
Which scaling relation a galaxy obeys depends on its morphological type. Galaxies with essentially no cold gas and therefore no ongoing star-formation appear as the relatively boring looking elliptical galaxies. These quiescent galaxies follow the fundamental plane, which relates the internal kinematics of these galaxies express as the central velocity dispersion to their surface brightness and physical size. By comparing the physical size predicted by this relation to its angular size on the sky, we are able to obtain the distance to such a galaxy by using simple trigonometry. While measurements of the angular size and surface brightness can be done on the already collected data of the photometric DESI Legacy Imaging Survey, we will need spectroscopic data for the central velocity dispersion. The central velocity dispersion quantifies the statistical dispersion of the motion of stars in the center of a galaxy.

The impact of the central velocity dispersion σ0 on the shape of two spectral lines. (credit: ChangHoon Hahn)

In DESI, fibers collect spectra from the innermost parts of these galaxies. In these spectra, the central velocity dispersion manifests as broadening of the spectral lines. However, to reliably recover these features, one needs spectroscopic data of excellent quality. Luckily most of our targets are bright galaxies, which are masked areas that within there are no high redshift galaxies targeted in DESI during dark time (best observing conditions). This means our additional observations have only little competition and over the course of the DESI survey, we will be able to gather data we need without interfering with the main DESI observations.

Round and Round it Goes…
The maximum rotation velocity of spiral galaxies is tightly linked to its absolute luminosity via the so-called Tully-Fisher relation. By comparing the predicted absolute luminosity to the observed apparent luminosity from DESI Legacy Imaging Survey, one can derive the distance to these galaxies. The maximum rotation velocity can be measured by placing fibers along the semi-major axis of the galaxy and just comparing the measured redshifts at these locations. As our targets are big and bright galaxies, the geometry of DESI often even requires fibers to placed somewhere on these galaxies, so we made sure that they will end up on the best possible location to maximize our science output.

These figures illustrate how the additional data about peculiar velocities can improve the strength of DESI cosmological measurements at low redshifts. (credit: Cullan Howlett)

The answer to life, the universe, and everything
While it seems to be simple, getting from redshifts and redshift-independent distance measurements to peculiar motions, it requires a lot of careful modeling of all kinds of biases and selection effects. In the end, we want to obtain solid measurements for cosmological parameters from the data. Peculiar velocities can supplement the measurements on the growth of structure that are usually from redshift space distortions and we can thereby can get tighter constraints on the cosmological parameter f σ8 , also refereed to as the growth rate (of structure). Its evolution over time and its scale-dependence can used to test for possible deviations from General Relativity. Additionally, by using galaxy scaling relations as distance indicators, we are able to collect data about the kinematics of a large sample of galaxies that will help us to gain better insights into the dark matter halo relation.

Step by step…
We were able to obtain our first measurements using the survey validation data of DESI, in particular the 1% survey. These first results helped us to test and improve our target selection methods, which are now applied to the ongoing main DESI survey. We are currently preparing several publications, which are to be released along with the first public release of DESI data, that will present the details of our target selection methods and the first results from the fundamental plane and Tully-Fisher relation. While data collected so far is sufficient for the basic calibrations of our methods, it will still take years until the survey is completed and we have sufficient data for strong scientific results and the chance of discovering any new physics beyond our current standard model.

A DIY Guide for Upgrading Your 100 Million Dollar World Class Astronomical Instrument

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John Della Costa, University of Florida
October 2, 2021

Astronomy is fun. But have you ever wanted to make it even better? Then why not try upgrading your 100 million dollar world class astronomical instrument! This may sound like an extremely difficult challenge that would require more than 30 people and many weeks of labor intensive work around the clock, and you’d be right! But with this handy DIY guide, you’ll be able to contribute in no time at all! So, follow along with this step-by-step tutorial and you’ll be observing the universe with your unrivaled, upgraded instrument faster than you can say, “Oh no, I only see 12 positioners but I plugged in 13. Please don’t make me take the whole petal apart again!”

Working carefully with fibers and electronic connectors.

Step 1: Get to the mountain
Remote mountaintops in dry locations are the best places to house telescopes. If you’re lucky, your amazing instrument will be located on the top of one in Southern Arizona. But first, you have to get to it! After your 4 hour plane ride in the lap of luxury, rent a vehicle and drive for 50 minutes until you get to the mountain road gate. Make sure to remember the combination for the lock (you still have the email with it, right?). Next, drive up the winding path to the summit. Try not to break any vertebrae as your neck becomes rubber from the occasional glimpses of the massive telescope your instrument desperately clings to. You’ve done it, you’re on the mountain!

Step 2: Get your safety briefing
Your safety briefing is one of the most important steps required for you to upgrade your instrument. When you’re on the mountain, there will likely be many creatures just waiting to kill you! So, be prepared, and never, ever, leave your food next to your bed as you sleep with the window open.

Step 2.5: Did you get food for your stay?
Did you really forget to get food for your 3 week stay on a mountain? Did you think you were going to subsist off of cacti and spiders? Now, drive back down the mountain, go to the grocery store another hour away, and drive back another hour again. Make sure you bought enough food to completely fill the freezer in the house so that you’ll have extra to throw out when you leave.

Step 3: Start disassembly of the first petal
By the time you get back to the dome after gluing your freezer shut, Petal 4 should be out of the telescope. But, before you start disassembly, make sure to test those pesky positioners with their mysterious ailment that nobody can understand. Now you’re ready to start disassembly! Just kidding, you have to take off the covers first. Make sure you use the correct tool or you might strip the… You stripped the screws, didn’t you? Well, that’s ok! Just make sure you have your hammer and drill close by so you can start going to town on your extremely fragile, multi-million dollar petal! But luckily, no other screws will be stripped on any other petal (foreshadowing). Now that you’ve spent many precious hours on this, you can start to disassemble the petal! Make sure as you pull out each positioner’s connector you really get your thumb and index finger in there. Don’t worry though, this definitely won’t leave you with nubs after doing it 5000 times… Wow, you’re fast! It only took you 3 hours of nonstop work! You should probably go home now and get some rest. Luckily your accommodations are only a 5 minute drive away (on the top of a mountain in complete darkness)!

Step 4: Start petal reassembly
Once the petal is completely taken apart, all 500 positioners are successfully unplugged, and all the transverse boards are out, you can get started on petal reassembly! Make sure not to snap any fibers, it’s not like they’re irreplaceable or anything. Finally, after two to three days of nonstop work, you’ll have your petal completely put back together. Now, just put it back in the telescope with that giant crane attached to the dome that lifts the 200 pound petal 30 feet into the air (seriously though, this part is terrifying to watch).

Step 5: Rinse and repeat!
Now all you have to do is repeat steps 3 and 4 seven more times (you’ll probably only be able to get 8 petals done during your 3 weeks on the mountain)!

Step 5.5: Take some time off
Make sure to take a day off here and there. Go for a hike, see some cacti (make sure to pick up their fruit with no hesitation, they can’t hurt you!), drive down the mountain and back up again, and enjoy the 110 degree weather (it’s a dry heat)!

John on the mountain with the Mayall Telescope in the background.

Step 6: Make sure it’s not too easy
Be sure that Petal 6 has a lot of issues so that you have to take it apart and put it back together. Twice! But don’t worry, it’s great practice, and your thumbs will thank you later.

Step 7: Bask in the glory of an upgraded instrument
Now that you’ve completed the disassembly and reassembly of your world class multi-object spectrograph, you can start observing, again, and get back to deciphering the mysteries of the universe!

Step 7.5:
Wait, you’re telling me we have to test the instrument for weeks after reassembling it? Will we ever get to start observing again?

Well, while you wait, you can look back at the over 5000 pictures you took while you were on the mountain and think back at the amazing, once in a lifetime experience you had while helping to upgrade one of the best astronomical instruments on planet Earth, and remember all the skills you learned and all of the amazing people you met along the way.

An Upgraded DESI Returns to the Sky

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Claire Poppett, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
October 1, 2021

Anybody who has observed with the DESI instrument has experienced uncommunicable positioners on the focal plane that lead to frustrating pauses in the observing schedule whilst the lead observer or a focal plane expert work to bring these devices back. During the Tuscon summer monsoon season in 2021 a team of DESI collaboration members worked with NOIRLab staff to upgrade the DESI instrument and make these experiences a problem of the past.

A technician carefully removes fibers (blue) and electronic connectors (rainbow) from electrical and mechanical supports.

To understand why these positioners become uncommunicable, we must first understand how they communicate.

The DESI positioners communicate via a Controller Area Network (CAN bus) and are grouped into patches of 25-75 positioners per CAN bus. Unfortunately, we have discovered that if a single positioner has a faulty communication signal it can affect the other positioners in that patch. The bigger issue here is that this loss in communications leads to a loss in their telemetry and the possibility that they may exceed our temperature limits without our knowledge. The collaboration agreed that this problem needed to be fixed and so a remediation plan was developed.

It was determined that the simplest way to be able to turn off a faulty positioner was to add a relay switch into the hardware but this required a major upgrade to the architecture of the focal plane. This was not possible without removing the focal plane from the telescope and so at the end of July, NOIRLab staff began the arduous task of getting the telescope into a state that made it possible to remove focal plane petals and install them onto work carts staged in temporary clean tents on the C-floor of the Mayall.

One of 10 petals being removed from the back of the focal plane with the telescope secured at the South-East platform.

Once the petals were on the floor every single fiber and every single positioner wire had to be handled in order to remove the old communications boards from the petals in order to allow new boards with relay switches to be installed. These upgrades were performed on all 10 petals and included extensive testing to ensure that all devices now communicated as reliably as possible. The final petal was inserted back into the focal plane on August 25th and by lunchtime the next day we were able to declare that we had a healthy focal plane.

After only 10 weeks of downtime, the instrument was returned to service during the week of September 12th. Recalibration of the focal plane. Main Survey observations re-commenced on the evening of September 21. Despite the full moon, 60,000 Bright Galaxy Survey redshifts were measured that first night back!

All signs so far point to a truly upgraded DESI focal plane and we can look forward to many more years of DESI science!

Cosmic Cartography

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Claire Lamman, Harvard University
August 20, 2021

For many, the term “explorers” brings to mind long ocean voyages, adventurers plunging into jungles, and traders discovering new connections between continents. Exploring, as a profession, became obsolete as there were simply no large, unexplored regions left and Earth became thoroughly mapped out.

However, there are still many uncharted regions beyond our planet. Hundreds of modern-day explorers are mapping out the galaxies around us, a craft that I like to think of as Cosmic Cartography. Fortunately for us, there’s not as much scurvy and snakes involved, but there is a massive effort behind today’s surveys and cosmology comes with its own set of adventures. 

DESI is creating the most detailed map yet of nearby galaxies. To celebrate the connection between early terrestrial and early cosmic explorers, I’ve made this DESI art in the style of early world maps. Here is a guide to some of the details:

  1. A history of our universe. Since the big bang, our universe went through many changes as matter formed and eventually made stars, galaxies, and us. To understand how these changes happen, and how fast the universe is growing, we need to understand what it’s made of.
  2. Pie chart of the universe. From our observations, we know that normal matter (the stuff that stars, dust, you, and I are made of) only accounts for about 5% of content in universe. 26% is dark matter- matter we cannot see but can study through how its gravity affects the normal matter and light around it. The other 69% is dark energy. As far as we know, about the only thing it has in common with dark matter is a spooky name. Dark energy is the mysterious force we credit with the rapid expansion of the cosmos. For more information see this blog post.
  3. Time Map. Light takes time to travel. The light we see from nearby galaxies is relatively young, but from older galaxies it comes from a much older universe. Therefore, we can get a glimpse at what the universe looked like at different times by mapping it out near and far away. This is the map made by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) of galaxies around us. Earth is at the center. It looks like an hourglass because those are the galaxies in the part of the sky where SDSS was measuring. If you look closely, you may be able to see some structure – in places with the most data you can pick out a sponge or web pattern.
  4. DESI. This is our logo. Our mission is to make a more detailed map so we can explore some of the remaining questions about dark energy and the evolution of the universe.
  5. The DESI Footprint. This map shows the parts of the sky where DESI is looking. We call it the “footprint”. One chunk is south of the Milky Way (left) and one is north of it (right). DESI has already picked out the 30 million galaxies that we will measure. For more information see this blog post.
  6. DESI’s home. DESI is located on a mountaintop in Arizona, Kitt Peak (left). It’s part of the biggest telescope on the mountain, the Mayall (right).
  7. The Telescope. This is what lies under the dome – a massive structure supporting a 15-ton primary mirror, fine-tuned optics, a focal plane, and a separate room filled with spectrographs. More on all of this below.
  8. How it works. This is a simplified diagram of the telescope. First, light hits the primary mirror. It then reflects up into a series of lenses before hitting the focal plane. The focal plane is a disk of 5,000 robotic positioners, each able to gather the light of their own galaxy. The light from each robot is then sent via fiber optic cables to spectrographs, which measure the light so we can get a spectra for each galaxy (11).
  9. The focal plane. We often plot the values of each positioner, as they’re positioned on the focal plane. This is a drawing of what we saw when the telescope pointed at Andromeda. This galaxy takes up the perfect amount of sky so that we have a “picture” of it just by looking at positioner values. The other galaxies are far enough away that each gets its own positioner.
  10. The positioners. Here is a diagram of what one of the robotic positioners looks like, with a drawing of one in the background.
  11. Spectra. This is the type of measurement we want to get of every galaxy. Light from a galaxy contains many signals, coded in the amount of light that is present for different amounts of energy. When you plot the intensity of light as a function of energy (or wavelength) you see something like this. This is the spectra of a quasar, a brilliant type of galaxy with a very active black hole at its center. We expect to see certain peaks at certain energy levels. These shift based on the galaxy’s movement and allow us to measure its distance. For more information see this blog post.

More details

  1. Draco. Star locations and art of the constellation Draco. You can’t have an old map without a serpent!
  2. Tomog. Tomog is the Oʼodham word for the Milky Way. The Tohono O’odham people are native to Kitt Peak and the land surrounding it.
  3. Cosmic Linguistics. These equations help astronomers describe and study cosmology. They express everything from how further objects look dimmer to how different components of the universe affect its evolution.
  4. DESI Dog. Our beloved mascot, the DESI coyote, with the constellation Canis major, or “the big dog”.

Diversity of DESI SV Quasars

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Victoria Fawcett, Durham University
July 22, 2021

As the main DESI survey gets truly underway, I want to reflect on the amazing quality of the DESI quasar spectra observed so far. Quasars are incredibly luminous types of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), which consist of a supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxies, surrounded by a disc of matter that often outshines the entire galaxy. Quasars are one of the brightest objects in the Universe and are really important in all areas of Astronomy, especially Cosmology.

With over 30,000 quasar spectra observed so far, DESI is already pushing beyond what previous spectroscopic surveys have achieved. The image shows these ~30,000 spectra stacked in different bins of redshift, with the lowest redshift bin (z<0.4) corresponding to the objects closest to us. The dashed lines indicate the main emission lines in the spectra, each of which provide important information about the nature of the object: for example, the Oxygen lines can be used to study outflows close to the supermassive black hole. The clarity of the spectra and different lines really highlights the amazing quality of the data—the two red dotted lines show galaxy absorption lines, so we can even clearly see the affect of the surrounding galaxy!

Other exotic objects such as Broad Absorption Line Quasars (BALQSOs), systems known to host powerful outflows, have also been found within DESI (see image below). The dips to the left of the CIV, SiIV and Lya line are called BAL “troughs”, which deepen with increasing “balnicity index (BI)”; a measure of the strength of the trough. Studying these systems may be really important for understanding the processes that connect AGNs and their host galaxies.

DESI also pushes to fainter and more obscured systems which have been difficult to observe with shallower spectroscopic surveys. Quasars enshrouded by dust (“red quasars”) may represent an important phase in galaxy evolution so understanding their properties is crucial – these are the objects I am most interested in!

With millions of more quasar spectra to come, the future of quasar physics looks bright. I personally look forward to analysing the data and exploring all the weird and wonderful objects DESI has to offer.

The Beginnings of the 3-Dimensional Map

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David Schlegel, DESI Project Scientist
July 22, 2021

Only eight weeks into DESI’s five-year mission, a 3-dimensional map of the universe is starting to take shape.

Plotted below is a “pie diagram” slice through the universe, with earth in the lower left, looking out in the directions of the constellations Virgo, Serpens and Hercules to distances beyond 5 billion light years. As this video progresses, the vantage point sweeps through 20 degrees towards Bootes and Corona Borealis. Each point represents a DESI target. The nearest are the bright galaxy sample (BGS as white points), then the luminous red galaxies (LRGs in red), emission line galaxies (ELGs in green), and finally quasi-stellar objects (QSOs in blue). Each of these targets is composed of 100 billion to 1 trillion stars, although we plot each target only as a single point. Gravity has clustered the galaxies into structures called the “cosmic web”, with dense clusters, filaments and voids.

DESI shuts down today for summer maintenance and upgrades, timed to coincide with the monsoon season in Arizona. When observations re-start in September, five times more galaxies will be observed at each sky location, gaps in this map will be filled in, and the area surveyed will eventually grow to span most of the sky visible from the northern hemisphere.

What do DESI’s 5000 eyes see?

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Bela Abolfathi, University of California Irvine
June 1, 2021

On May 17, DESI officially began a 5-year survey of the cosmos to study dark energy and its role in the accelerated expansion of the universe. Over the course of its survey, DESI will collect spectra from over 30 million galaxies across 11 billion years, a feat that will result in the largest 3D map of the universe ever created.

Prof. David Kirkby at UC Irvine created an interactive 3D visualization that helps put into perspective exactly how ambitious of an undertaking this is. The visualization linked to the image below shows around 30,000 galaxies observed during the survey validation phase—less than 0.1% of the galaxies DESI will eventually catalog—jam-packed into the space behind your palm held at arm’s length.

Try the interactive version here (credit: David Kirkby/DESI collaboration)

Each of the four types of galaxies specifically targeted by DESI are denoted by a separate color and correspond to bright galaxies (BGS), luminous red galaxies (LRG), emission-line galaxies (ELG), and quasars (QSO). These types populate different redshift regimes, as seen from the progression of colors over the course of the movie. That’s not to say that types are confined to select regions of redshift-space. Rather, they are targeted in this way because, once they’ve been redshifted to our telescope, their unique signatures fall into the 360-980 nanometer window registered by our detectors. In the case of high-redshift quasars, these objects are selected because they help reveal the distribution of matter in the intergalactic medium via the shadows they cast along their journey.

Like the opening crawl at the beginning of every Star Wars movie, the visualization starts in the nearby universe and takes us back in time to distances far, far away. Exactly how do we determine these distances? We start with each galaxy’s redshift, which we can measure from its observed spectrum. Both the composition and curvature of the universe will determine how fast it’s expanding, and by extension any notion of distance. We therefore need to assume a particular cosmological model in order to then transform from redshift to comoving distance.

The visualization defaults to using the fiducial values of 31% matter, 69% dark energy, and zero curvature. Changing these parameters will have a noticeable effect on the distance traveled as well as the age of the universe.

One of DESI’s main cosmological probes is baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), the imprints of relic sound waves from the early universe. BAO is a standard ruler used to measure the scale at which galaxies tend to cluster. The concentric circles emanating from the center of the 3D visualization show the comoving 150 Mpc BAO scale at which we expect galaxies to cluster slightly more often compared to a random distribution of galaxies.

Plugging Away

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Michael Levi, DESI Director
May 14, 2021

On the eve of the official start of the DESI science survey, I wanted to take a minute to reflect on how we arrived at this exciting moment. We’ve now proven that we can obtain 100,000 science-quality spectra in a single night, so we are ready! It has been quite a long and at times bumpy road to get here, but it has always been an honor to be part of this team. Of course, the ground was prepared by SDSS-BOSS, which established BAO as a precision probe of dark energy and created a desire to go beyond plug-plates. The seeds of this project germinated in 2008 out of the DOE/NASA JDEM space mission competition, when Saul Perlmutter and I were co-PI’s of the SNAP/JDEM proposal. The competing JDEM concepts led to the realization that a lot of the proposed BAO science could be performed from the ground, and this in turn led very quickly to a new concept for a ground-based spectroscopic survey. A rapid-fire set of ad hoc proposals and public presentations to DOE and NSF agency committees ensued as a core formed around this idea.

At the 2009 Particle Astrophysics Scientific Assessment Group (a subpanel of the NSF/DOE HEPAP Federal Advisory Committee), Nikhil Padmanabhan (then an LBNL Chamberlain Fellow), gave a presentation, which resulted in a recommendation to support the R&D. David Schlegel presented the BigBOSS concept to the 2010 Decadal Survey, which recommended mid-scale projects, explicitly calling out ground-based spectroscopic surveys as a compelling area of interest. In early 2011, two unsolicited proposals were submitted to DOE, for BigBOSS led by LBNL, and for DESpec a competing concept led by FNAL. This prompted the formation in mid-2011 of a dark energy community planning panel, chaired by Rocky Kolb, to advise the agency. The panel identified a wide-field spectroscopic survey as a key project that would meet the needs of the dark energy community. DOE agreed and, in the year following, approved “Mission Need” (aka CD-0) for a Mid-Scale Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (MS-DESI) on Sept 18, 2012. 

Group photo at the inaugural meeting of MS-DESI 2013 (M. Levi in the center, see original note here) and DESI meeting on December 2020

DOE didn’t make a down-select between BigBOSS and DESpec. Instead, they assigned the management of the new MS-DESI project to Berkeley Lab on Dec 12, 2012 and charged us to form a new collaboration. I was appointed Project Director the next week and given the task to figure it out and come back with a plan. Fortunately, we had just received a $2.1M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for a spectroscopic survey (followed a bit later by a similar grant from the Heising-Simons Foundation) and this provided the financial resources for us to get started building the first spectrograph and initiating the long-lead acquisition of the corrector lenses.  At the same time, we began to hold collaboration meetings and created a “big tent” where all were welcome, and the DESI collaboration grew to include most of the institutions of the original proposals, plus many additional recruits.

A year later, in 2013, I presented the new plan and the newly formed science goals to the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5), a subpanel of the NSF/DOE HEPAP Federal Advisory Committee. The P5 report, issued in mid-2014, recommended MS-DESI only in an optimistic budget scenario. Fortunately, budgets did align sufficiently for us to eke out a start in 2015 (albeit financially constrained) with CD-1 approval (site selection, and establishment of cost range) in March 2015 and with Congressional authorization in the appropriations language that year. DESI was then baselined in Sept 2015, construction started, and the rest is history as they say. Although there were plenty of remaining bumps in the road during construction, I will save that for another time.

It is a privilege for me to represent the collaboration and contribute to its continuing success, and I hope all our collaborators feel equally privileged. The DESI collaboration has come together in this common quest to understand dark energy and the mysteries of the accelerating Universe. Now the telescope and instrument are humming, twilight and science awaits.

DESI Begins Search for Elusive Dark Energy

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Paul Martini, DESI Instrument Scientist
May 17, 2021

The discovery of cosmic acceleration over twenty years ago captured the imagination of the general public and professional scientists alike, and the cause of this acceleration remains one of the greatest, unsolved questions in science. Something mysterious, such as a new particle, a new force of nature, or some property of space itself, is overcoming the gravitational attraction of all of the mass in the universe. While we commonly call the origin of this acceleration ‘dark energy,’ naming it did not solve the mystery, nor have the last two decades of progressively larger and more sophisticated sky surveys. 

Enter the DESI survey. For the last decade, hundreds of scientists and engineers have worked to build a new instrument and design a survey capable of constructing the most precise measurement of cosmic expansion history ever. On Friday, May 14 this work came to fruition with the formal launch of survey observations. And over the next five years, DESI will measure approximately 35 million galaxies and quasars that extend across about 12 billion years of cosmic history. These observations will measure an order of magnitude more targets than the largest survey to date, and complete these observations in a small fraction of the time. 

DESI aims to survey about 14,000 square degrees of the night sky, which corresponds to most of the sky visible from Arizona. We will do this with over 15,000 unique observations that we call tiles. Each of these tiles is a unique configuration of the 5000 robotically-positioned fiber optic cables designed to collect the light of specific galaxies and quasars distributed across the 3.2 degree diameter field of view of the instrument. 

The image below shows a small fraction of this field of view that includes the nearby Coma cluster of galaxies, one of the largest concentrations of galaxies in the local universe. The circles in the bottom panel illustrates the high density of the spectroscopic observations obtained with a single tile. Nearly 10,000 of these tiles are designed for good to great conditions, such as when the Moon does not appreciably affect the darkness of the night sky. In these cases, we observe our faintest targets, including luminous red galaxies, emission-line galaxies, and quasars. The remaining tiles target brighter galaxies and Milky Way stars, sources that can be observed when the moon is brighter and there may be moderate cloud cover.

A small part of the Coma cluster of galaxies (top) with redshifts from DESI added (bottom). This nearby cluster is approximately 300 million light years from Earth and is one of the largest concentrations of galaxies in the local universe. It contains many thousands of galaxies comparable to or larger than our Milky Way in size. Both the large number and high density of redshift measurements is a small sample of how efficiently DESI can measure galaxies.The area of this image is less than 1% of the field of view of DESI. (Credit: DESI collaboration and DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys)

As the DESI survey will be so much larger than previous surveys, we anticipate measuring cosmic acceleration and other parameters with substantially smaller statistical errors. Yet in order to fully realize these gains, and not be limited by systematic effects, it is especially important for us to carefully plan all aspects of the experimental design and maximize the reproducibility of our work. One aspect of this is that we have built substantial software and hardware systems to help us to achieve the same sensitivity with all of our tiles, in spite of the fact that they will be observed on nights spread over five years, and obtained under nights with varying amounts of atmospheric turbulence or seeing, and varying amounts of cloud cover. Other aspects include superb and repeatable algorithms that handle every aspect of observing, ranging from the selection of potential targets, to the assignment of targets to the individual fibers, to the measurement of their properties. 

We have spent the last many months building, testing, and refining all of these aspects of the survey with increasingly sophisticated and extensive observations. During this Survey Validation phase, we have obtained over 1 million unique redshifts, which has already made DESI the second largest spectroscopic redshift survey in the world before it formally begins. Over the coming months, we expect that the number of new galaxies and quasars we measure will continue to expand, much like the universe itself!

DESI begins its “1% Survey”

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Daniel Eisenstein, Harvard University
April 28, 2021

On April 5, 2021, DESI turned to the second and final phase of its Survey Validation (SV) work, the so-called “1% survey”.  Whereas the first phase of SV was aimed at getting long and definitive observations of a broad superset of the planned spectroscopic targets, the 1% survey aims to demonstrate that we can operate the facility in a model closely matched to that planned for the 5-year survey.

The 1% survey is being conducted with target selection similar to what is planned for the main survey and with exposure times only mildly longer.  Importantly, we aim to observe each region of sky more times than in the main survey so that we achieve a higher fiber-assignment completeness, the fraction of targets that are assigned a fiber.

A single exposure with DESI provides about 600 fibers per square degree, but the survey target lists contain about 3500 targets per square degree for the dark/grey conditions (when the moon is small or set) and about 2000-2500 targets per square degree for bright conditions (when the moon is fuller).  In the main survey, we will return to a point on the sky numerous times to observe about 80% of the targets, but allowing some incompleteness so that we can efficiently move on to new regions.  In the 1% survey, we plan to return to each region at least 10 times for dark-time targets and 8 times for bright-time targets, each with a distinct target list, so as to observe all but a few percent of the targets.

So far, we have started observations on 16 regions, each 7 square degrees and each including both dark-time and bright-time targets.  We expect to finish this program in May.  With this data set, we will be able to get a first estimate of the 3-dimensional clustering of the galaxy and quasar samples, which will then allow the collaboration to tune the models of simulated galaxy positions in our cosmological mock catalog.

With the observations moving at normal survey pace from one target set to the next, the rate of gathering new redshifts has increased dramatically.  In the first 8 nights, we acquired over 400,000 separate successful redshift measurements of 350,000 unique sources.

DESI Collaboration. Daniel Eisenstein (Harvard University)

The plot shows a visualization of one of the 16 regions, which has 13 dark-time visits, showing a map of the galaxy locations in Mpc on the plane of the sky.  Only galaxies between redshift 0.90 and 0.95 are shown, with the luminous red galaxy targets plotted in red and the emission-line galaxy targets in blue.  One can see the cosmic web of large-scale structure, with walls, filaments, and voids, as well as the tendency of red galaxies to cluster together more than blue galaxies.  This is about 1 part in 20,000 of the final survey size!

DESI Embarks on Survey Validation

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Daniel Eisenstein, Harvard University
April 19, 2021

Since mid-December, DESI has been intensively performing its Survey Validation (SV) observations. With SV, we seek to optimize the 5-year survey design using on-sky observations of our target classes. We of course based our designs on what was known before DESI, but DESI is a big enough step forward that one can’t be sure until one verifies the performance with the instrument itself!

One of the challenges for Survey Validation is that we want to verify our survey plans with targets that are fainter and spread over wider areas of the sky than have previously been observed. So we need to make our own truth tables by observing our targets with much longer exposures than we plan for the survey, so that the correct answers become obvious. We then can split the observations into portions to see what a survey-length exposure would yield. 

A small region from the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), roughly 0.1 degree across, overlaid with redshifts from DESI survey validation spectroscopy. Visible here are representatives from DESI’s major extragalactic targets: two quasars (QSO) beyond redshift 2; luminous red galaxies at redshift 0.8; an emission-line galaxy at redshift 1.1, fainter than r-band magnitude 23; and two brighter galaxies at lower redshift. The grey circle marks the location of a fiber placed on a blank position to monitor the emission from the sky.

From mid-December through the end of March, DESI observed 161 separate tiles as part of the first phase of its survey validation program, collecting over 1600 separate spectroscopic exposures. We combined 4.3 million separate observations of 465,000 distinct examples of our target classes, with an average of 95 minutes per target, obtaining redshifts for 412,000 objects. This is already one of the largest extragalactic spectroscopic data sets ever collected, including 108,000 redshifts above 0.8.

The whole DESI collaboration has mobilized to analyze these on-sky data, because rapid answers are needed to define the main survey. The results have been very encouraging; we’ll share more examples in future blog posts.

An Undergrad Perspective on DESI

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Brian Bauer, Daniel Allspach, and Noah Franz
April 16, 2021

We are a working group of three undergraduate students at Siena College. We started with DESI under Dr. John Moustakas in February 2020. We were intrigued by the opportunity to work with such a large collaboration with so many scientific possibilities. Since then, Noah Franz and Brian Bauer have focused on identifying strong gravitational lenses in DESI spectra by using Python to separate the source and lens galaxy spectra then analyzing the success. Daniel Allspach has been working to fit stellar templates to model DESI spectra continua and determine galactic demographics and outflow classifications. Contributing to these projects has provided us with invaluable insight and experience into working with large collaborations.

Left to right: Noah Franz, Brian Bauer, Daniel Allspach

After working with DESI, attending Zoom telecons, and learning how a collaboration functions, what we enjoyed most of all is the welcoming nature of everyone involved. Without this feeling of acceptance we would have found it difficult to integrate into a project effectively. Although receiving emails in the wee hours of the morning can be a little odd at first, we were able to quickly adapt and become accustomed to the practices and methods employed by DESI. Being included in any aspect of the project, especially as an undergraduate, is an honor, yet we were continually challenged to dive deeper and join as much as we can. A welcoming environment provides the perfect jumping off point for new members and that is truly the best part about the DESI collaboration.

With over 700 contributing members, DESI is a large collaboration, and, as undergraduate researchers we found entering the community of mostly graduate students and PhDs intimidating and overwhelming. While some of the DESI updates and zoom meetings can be daunting, after spending time reading the literature and learning the acronyms we became accustomed to the jargon. Once we surpassed this learning curve, we were able to start our own research projects. In many ways this was our introduction into large scale collaborative astronomy and cosmology: many things are new to us. Having the DESI environment to help us orient and navigate this research environment has been incredibly helpful. DESI has given us a fantastic first experience not just with research but also working with a large collaboration. As a result, we all were inspired to continue research going into the future.

Women in DESI on International Women’s Day

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Education and Public Outreach group collaborators (Shanthala Gorur, Michael Wilson, Alma González, and many others)
March 8, 2021

To commemorate the 2021 International day of Women, March 8th, we wanted to highlight and show the work of the many women working in DESI.

We asked the women in DESI to share with us their advise for the new generations to come, and the work they are doing in DESI.

We start this post with a collage from the pictures and a small selection of the responses.

This post will continue with some more of the particular responses, on twitter, stay tuned.

SPANISH VERSION