Our cameras in the world’s largest all-lens telescope

The MOTHRA project was unveiled yesterday and we couldn’t be prouder: our cameras are being integrated into the world’s largest all-lens telescope, with capabilities that are unmatched by any other telescope on Earth or in space.

This next-generation telescope, designed to reveal the cosmic web – the vast network of gas and dark matter that connects galaxies across the universe – is being developed by Dragonfly FRO, the first Focused Research Organization centered on astrophysics.

MOTHRA (Modular Optical Telephoto Hyperspectral Robotic Array) is a distributed-aperture telescope composed of 1,140 high-end telephoto lenses, which together synthesize the power of a single giant telescope.

«Both the APX60 and APX26 models exceeded our expectations in sensitivity, noise performance, and long-term stability – all critical for Dragonfly’s ultra-low surface brightness imaging.

After evaluating multiple providers, ATIK’s combination of engineering excellence, collaborative spirit, and outstanding support made them the clear choice for deploying over 1000 scientific-grade CMOS cameras across our next-generation Telephoto Array,» declared Roberto Abraham and Pieter van Dokkum, co-founder of Dragonfly FRO.

The MOTHRA design has grown out of the Dragonfly Telephoto Array concept, which demonstrated the capability to find and study extremely faint, extended structures, previously undetected using conventional telescopes. MOTHRA is a dramatic upscaling, enabling it to detect ultra-faint gas between galaxies that traces the dark matter distribution of the Universe. This “cosmic web” is a complex network of structures imprinted in space at the earliest moments after the Big Bang, growing to enormous size as the Universe expanded. The telescope will not just reveal where the gas is, but also how it moves along the spokes of the web.

“MOTHRA is a telescope designed around a single idea: maximize discovery space for the dim glow of intergalactic gas,” said Pieter van Dokkum, Co-Founder of Dragonfly FRO. “The combination of a huge effective aperture, wide field, and tunable ultra-narrowband filtering opens a new observational regime.”

MOTHRA is being built at El Sauce Observatory in Chile. The telescope’s construction started in the spring of 2025 and it is expected to become fully operational by the end of 2026. By fusing its many images together digitally, the array of 1,140 telephoto lenses will be the equivalent of a single 4.7-meter diameter lens.

“This is an ambitious project to build something astronomers have wanted for a long time: a practical way to directly see the cosmic web in emission, and to get it done in a couple of years rather than decades,” said Roberto Abraham, Co-Founder of Dragonfly FRO. “MOTHRA harnesses advances in optics, detectors, and computing power to look at the universe in a new way. The telescope is totally unique.”