Thales SESO delivered to the Dark Energy Survey consortium a set of impressive large lenses forming the wide field optical corrector of an astronomical observing facility located in Chile. The Dark Energy Survey project is a worldwide organization for fundamental research about the origin of the accelerating universe thank to demonstration of existence of this dark energy. A complex opto-mechanical instrument named DECam (for Dark Energy Camera) has been built and installed at the focal plane of an existing ?4m telescope in order to perform such observations. This DECam exhibit simultaneously a wide field of view ( 2,2°) and an ultimate high resolution of 570Megapixels. The optical part produced by Thales SESO includes a set of 5 large silica lenses (up to 1 meter diameter) including different highly aspherical surfaces and broadband optical coating (350nm-1050nm)
Lenses have been now assembled into the corrector mount and then installed on-site into the telescope. The preliminary first observation get with this DECam including the Thales SESO lenses look very nice and fully fruitful.
For more info about Dark Energy Project and first observation results get with the DECam : http://www.darkenergysurvey.org
