Skip to main content
Atik Cameras has been selected to be the camera supplier for a massive expansion of the Dragonfly Telephoto Array project, aiming to capture extremely faint structures in the night sky and advance astrophysics knowledge worldwide.
The Dragonfly Telephoto Array is a novel telescope cluster concept designed to image large and extremely faint structures in the night sky.
These structures hold important clues to the distribution and nature of dark matter. They are hard to see with conventional large telescopes due to a combination of scattered light from bright stars and mosaiced detectors. Upon completion, the upgraded Dragonfly Array will be the world’s most powerful wide-field spectroscopic mapping telescope. The array will explore large structures with a factor of 50 greater sensitivity than conventional large telescopes, allowing astronomers to directly image for the first time the distribution of primordial gas tracing out the dark matter “cosmic web” linking galaxies together.
Atik Cameras supported this next phase of scientific exploration by supplying the Apx60 and Apx26 CMOS cameras for the imaging platform. These camera models provided Dragonfly with critically low read noise, low dark current, and high quantum efficiency – ideal for capturing the ultra-low surface brightness universe with clarity and depth. Atik’s integration into Dragonfly’s operational platform has enabled nightly optimisation and fast data availability for cloud-based analysis.
«Collaborating with the ATIK Cameras team has been one of the highlights of the Dragonfly project. From our earliest conversations to the final integration, their engineering team stood out for both their technical depth and their willingness to fully engage with our highly specific imaging requirements.»
What impressed us most was their ability to actively listen, rapidly prototype, and fine-tune solutions that aligned perfectly with the scientific demands of our system. The integration process was a true partnership. Their responsiveness was always fast, thoughtful, and effective. A joy to work with.», in the words of Pieter van Dokkum and Roberto Abraham – the project leaders and professors at Yale University and Unversity of Toronto, respectively.
This collaborative effort has further empowered Dragonfly’s science goals: to explore faint galaxy populations and further investigate the structure of dark matter with greater sensitivity and speed than ever before. This collaboration exemplifies Atik’s capacity to play a crucial role at the forefront of scientific discovery.
«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.»
