Nearest Stellar Nursery Gets Sharpest Portrait Yet From Dark Energy Camera

On Thursday, July 16, NSF NOIRLab released what may be the most striking astronomical image of 2026: a sweeping mosaic of the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud, the closest active birthplace of stars to our solar system, captured with a depth and breadth of detail that earlier ground-based telescopes could not have produced. The instrument behind it is the Dark Energy Camera - a 570-megapixel behemoth originally engineered to probe the universe's accelerating expansion across billions of light-years - now operating as an open-access community telescope after its flagship dark energy survey concluded in January 2019. That transition matters: when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory began its Legacy Survey of Space and Time on June 30, DECam was effectively freed from its primary cosmological mission, leaving it available to turn toward targets no one originally designed it to photograph - including, as this image shows, the turbulent star-forming clouds in our own astronomical backyard.