Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2026

17 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2026 ASTRO PUBLISHING “It’s part of the fabric of astronomy research now,” says David Schlegel, a co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and scientist at the Department of En- ergy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berke- ley Lab). “When you’re working with astronomical objects today, you often start by pulling up the Legacy Imaging Viewer to see what you’re looking at.” Covering roughly 75% of the sky in visible and near- infrared light, the updated map provides a deep view of the extragalactic Universe not blocked by the dust and stars of our own Milky Way. Researchers expect it will re- main the most comprehen- sive 2D map of our Universe for years to come. In addition to the extended file collection, the DESI Leg- acy Surveys’ full catalog of data is made available as a searchable database via the Astro Data Lab at the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), a Program of NSF NOIRLab. These services are accessible to the entire astronomy community to facilitate data access and analysis. “Explorations of our Universe al- ways start with images of the night P anoramic view of Kitt Peak National Observatory, home to the Mayall telescope (in the largest dome, on the left) with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. [KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/ P. Horálek (Institute of Physics in Opava)] A mong the nearly four billion ob- jects in the DESI Legacy Imaging Sur- veys’ map is Messier 96 (NGC 3368), a ma- jestic spiral galaxy nestled in the con- stellation Leo ap- proximately 35 million light-years from Earth. Spanning 100,000 light-years, slightly larger than our own Milky Way in size, it’s the bright- est member of the Messier 96 Group, the closest grouping of galaxies to our own Local Group. [DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys/LBNL/DOE & KPNO/CTIO/NOIR- Lab/NSF/AURA]