The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a 5000 square degree grizY survey of the Southern sky aimed at understanding the accelerating expansion rate of the Universe. DES is using four complementary methods to do this: weak gravitational lensing, galaxy cluster counts, baryon acoustic oscillations, and Type Ia supernovae. DES uses the 3 square degree Dark Energy Camera (DECam), a 570 Megapixel CCD imaging camera installed at the prime focus of on the Blanco 4m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory in northern Chile. The survey is being performed over a period of five years (2013-2018), and is recording information from roughly 300 million distant galaxies and 100 million Milky Way stars. Original acknowledgement for data: The NOAO Data Lab is operated by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the national center for ground-based nighttime astronomy in the United States operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.