Canon lenses help create the eye of MOTHRA

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an array of lenses stacked in tight grids Sits below a starry sky

MOTHRA observing at night. Each mount is equipped with a wide area web cam. Besides the mount in the foreground two others are visible. The skies at El Sauce Observatory in Chile are among the best on Earth for astronomy. The Milky Way is clearly visible, as well as the Large Magellanic Cloud, the patch just right of center. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a neighboring galaxy of the Milky Way.
Image: Dragonfly FRO

A new telescope called MOTHRA (Modular Optical Telephoto Hyperspectral Robotic Array) looks less like an observatory and more like a photography gearhead’s fever dream. The system consists of 1140 high-end Canon telephoto lenses, all aimed at the night sky. Instead of a single giant mirror, the rig stitches together the views from every lens to chase down some of the faintest structures in the universe.

This isn't the first time a collection of lenses has been used to function as a single giant telescope. The MOTHRA project stems from the Dragonfly Telephoto Array concept, first commissioned in 2013. It started with eight commercially available Canon EF 400mm F2.8L IS II USM lenses and gradually expanded to two clusters of 24 lenses each. The bug-themed names probably hint at the inspiration they drew from insect eyes, which use a bunch of what are effectively lenses to maximize light capture.

Rendering of the completed array. By the end of the year MOTHRA will have 1140 telephoto lenses distributed over 30 individual mounts, in two buildings. Its unique design is optimized for the study of the "cosmic web", a huge network of gas and dark matter that is thought to connect all galaxies in the universe.
Rendering: Dragonfly FRO

MOTHRA takes that idea to a new extreme, and represents a "dramatic upscaling of Dragonfly." Like the Dragonfly, though, MOTHRA will use Canon EF 400mm F2.8L lenses, each fitted with ultra-narrowband filters to isolate the faint light of hydrogen gas. The central wavelength of the filters is also adjustable by tilting them, letting each pixel sample a slightly different wavelength. The lenses will be arranged in 30 mounts, which will be held in two buildings, as you can see in the rendering above.

The group says the array of 1140 telephoto lenses will be equivalent to a single 4.8-meter-F0.08 refracting telescope, making it the world’s largest all-lens telescope. The array will be powerful enough to detect ultra-faint gas between galaxies, helping scientists better understand where that gas exists and how it moves through a "web" of dark matter.

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.
Image: Dragonfly FRO

"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."

Dragonfly FRO, a research organization spun out of the original Dragonfly Telephoto Array project, is building MOTHRA at the Obstech / El Sauce Observatory in Chile. Construction started in the spring of 2025, and it's expected to be operational by the end of this year.

Dragonfly FRO Unveils MOTHRA: A New Telescope to Reveal the Hidden Universe

Construction underway of world’s largest all-lens telescope, unmatched by any existing instrument on Earth or in space

First-of-its-kind telescope funded by Alex Gerko

NEW HAVEN, CT / TORONTO, ON / NEW YORK, NY / LONDON, UK — March 11, 2026 — Dragonfly FRO, LLC, a Focused Research Organization (FRO), today 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.

A Radical New Telescope Design for Probing the Spaces Between Galaxies

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.

MOTHRA is a dramatic upscaling of Dragonfly, 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. MOTHRA can be precisely tuned to detect faint glowing light from intergalactic gas trapped by this web of dark matter. The telescope will not just reveal where the gas is, but also how it moves along the spokes of the web.

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."

A New Model for Tackling Hard Scientific Problems

Dragonfly FRO is the first Focused Research Organization centered on astrophysics. Inspired by the pace and focus of tech startups, FROs are designed to tackle bottlenecks and build high-impact scientific public goods over a finite multi-year timeline. These efforts are often too large or too infrastructure-heavy for a single academic lab and don’t fit traditional funding structures or market-driven models.

"Focused research organizations are built for precisely this kind of problem: a clear mission, a hard technical bottleneck, and a capability that can benefit an entire field," said Anastasia Gamick, President and Co-Founder of Convergent Research. "Dragonfly FRO brings the FRO model to astrophysics, and MOTHRA is the kind of ambitious, enabling instrument that this model makes possible."

The launch of Dragonfly FRO and MOTHRA has been made possible through a donation from Alex Gerko. "Breakthrough instruments developed at speed often require new approaches — organizationally and technically," said Gerko. "I'm proud to support such an ambitious project focused on generating long-term scientific value, and to help pioneer a model designed to drive meaningful research progress on hard, foundational astronomical challenges."

Pieter van Dokkum said, "Alex's impact on this project extends well beyond funding. He has been a hands-on strategic partner from the start — shaping how we structured the organization, helping us find the right project partners and site, and guiding us through procurement and infrastructure challenges that would have slowed us down considerably."

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