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Open the free Legacy Survey Sky Viewer to explore the largest-ever 2D color map of the universe. You can pan and zoom, enter a sky position and zoom level in the URL, and click a target to open a spectrum view. The image shows where objects appear and how bright they look; spectra provide the distance measurements used to build a 3D map.
What the map shows
Released by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on August 10, 2026, the map contains 5.6 trillion pixels and nearly 4 billion celestial objects, covering roughly 75% of the sky in visible and near-infrared light. The figures describe the release; “nearly” and “roughly” matter because they are not exact counts or full-sky coverage.
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The image combines 263,407 telescope exposures from DECaLS, the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey and the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey, supplemented by years of NASA WISE satellite data and other public data. More than 160 scientists contributed to data collection, and a team of 20 produced the final dataset, according to Berkeley Lab.
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DESI’s Legacy Imaging Surveys describe optical and infrared imaging across the 14,000-square-degree DESI survey area, using optical g, r and z bands and four infrared bands. That survey-area figure is context, not a replacement for the map release’s roughly 75% sky-coverage figure. The project page gives approximate bounds of -18° < δ < +84° and |b| > 15°; see DESI’s Legacy Surveys overview.
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How to explore the map
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Open the Legacy Survey Sky Viewer, the public viewer linked by Berkeley Lab.
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Pan around the sky and zoom in or out to inspect the image. These interactions are documented in DESI’s data-access guide.
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To begin at a particular sky position, set right ascension (RA), declination (Dec) and zoom in the viewer URL. DESI’s guide gives this example:
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Click an individual target to open the interactive spectrum browser. DESI documents this target click-through and direct spectrum URLs for DESI DR1 catalog targets. For instructions involving DESI target spectra, use the documented DR1 viewer path rather than assuming every viewer has the same overlays or controls.
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The viewer is a practical way to browse the sky, not a substitute for downloading or analyzing the underlying survey data. DESI documents public web access, individual file downloads, sample subsets, database access through NOIRLab Astro Data Lab and bulk transfers through Globus. Its default “small” sample download is about 40 GB, so that figure applies to the documented data subset—not to opening the browser viewer.
What a 2D image can—and cannot—tell you
The map records where stars and galaxies appear on the sky and their apparent brightness. Those positions and brightnesses help DESI select targets, but the image alone does not establish each object’s distance. DESI measures target light at different wavelengths to derive distances and build a three-dimensional map.
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| View | What it measures | Best suited to | How to access it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Legacy Imaging Surveys map | Sky position and apparent brightness in images | Visual exploration and locating objects | Interactive browser viewer |
| DESI spectroscopic map | Spectra used to derive distances | Spatial and cosmological analysis | Spectrum browser and public data tools |
Researchers can use the images to look for objects or phenomena such as gravitational lenses and supernovae, and combine survey data with other observations. A suggestive image is not, by itself, confirmation of a discovery or a complete distance measurement.
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How the map fits into DESI’s survey
The Legacy Surveys were built to prepare for DESI’s spectroscopic survey. Berkeley Lab says the new imaging map has been used to select DESI targets since June 2026. DESI completed its original five-year survey ahead of schedule in April 2026, but observations are continuing into 2028; improved results using the first five years of data are expected in 2027. These are project-status statements reported by Berkeley Lab on August 10, 2026, and may change as the survey progresses.
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Berkeley Lab also reports that more than 1,800 science papers have referenced Legacy Surveys data to date. That is a count of papers referencing the broader survey data, not papers about this 2026 map release alone.
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