Overview
- The map, released Tuesday, August 11, 2026, spans roughly 75 percent of the sky and charts about 4 billion stars, galaxies and other objects in visible and near-infrared light.
- Project teams assembled the dataset from 263,407 telescope exposures gathered over 13 years and years of NASA WISE infrared data, with contributions from more than 160 scientists and a core team that produced the final release.
- The public images are available in the Legacy Survey Sky Viewer so professional astronomers and citizen scientists can search for rare phenomena such as gravitational lenses and short-lived transients like supernovae.
- The Legacy Imaging Surveys provided the 2D targeting base for DESI’s 3D spectroscopic work, and DESI — which by April 2026 had mapped over 47 million galaxies and quasars — will use continued observations to test early hints that dark energy may change over time.
- Past Legacy Survey releases have underpinned more than 1,800 scientific papers and the new full map is expected to support upcoming observatories, machine‑learning pipelines, and years of follow-up studies.