MOTHRA uses 1,140 Canon lenses to see the universe

GaryPageau ,
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The nebula RCW 114, also known as the Dragon’s Heart Nebula, was one of the first objects that MOTHRA looked at. It is the remnant of a star that exploded as a supernova about 20,000 years ago. The MOTHRA image is in the light of ionized hydrogen and spans an area of sky that is 250 times larger than the full moon.

Dragonfly FRO, LLC, a Focused Research Organization (FRO), announced the construction of MOTHRA, a next-generation telescope designed to reveal the cosmic web — the vast network of gas and dark matter that connects galaxies across the universe. MOTHRA employs a first-of-its-kind distributed aperture architecture with special filters to isolate the faint light of hydrogen gas. The FRO, a new type of scientific enterprise, was launched in partnership with Convergent Research and backed by Alex Gerko, the founder and CEO of XTX Markets.

Dragonfly FRO was founded in January 2025 and now introduces its mission, team, and technology alongside the launch of its website: mothratelescope.org.

MOTHRA is a distributed-aperture telescope composed of 1,140 high-end Canon telephoto lenses, which together synthesize the power of a single giant telescope. This 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.

Partially completed MOTHRA array observing under the Milky Way at El Sauce Observatory in Chile. Several mounts of the telescope are visible as they take data beneath one of the darkest skies on Earth.

“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 Obstech / 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. It will be the world’s largest all-lens telescope, with capabilities that are unmatched by any other telescope on Earth or in space.

“This is an ambitious project to build something astronomers have wanted for a long time: a practical way to directly see the cosmic web, 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.”