The image was acquired by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which is mounted on the Victor M. Blanco 4-Meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. DECam was originally designed to conduct a survey of distant galaxies to study dark energy, as it accelerates the universe's expansion and draws those galaxies away from us. On the completion of that survey, however, DECam has been used in a more general fashion.
It is one of the most powerful wide-field instruments ever built, and this image of the Vela supernova remnant is proof of its capabilities. It's, in fact, the largest image ever released by the camera at 1.3 gigapixel (1.3 billion pixels) in size. For comparison, a top-of-the-line smartphone might have a 48-megapixel (48 million pixel) camera. The Vela supernova remnant, which lies some 800 light-years away, is formed from the spilled guts of a massive star that exploded eleven millennia ago. The image has to be large to capture all that detail across such a large swath of the sky. As mentioned, the Vela supernova remnant is a cloud of gas and dust that is about 100 light-years across
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