By Ilana MacDonald, Dunlap Institute
What began in 2013 as a novel telescope made from combining just three commercially available telephoto camera lenses has undergone a dramatic metamorphosis into one of the world’s most powerful telescopes. The Dragonfly Telephoto Array has evolved into MOTHRA, a next-generation telescope built from 1,140 high-end lenses mounted on 30 robotic mounts and operating at a remote mountain site in Chile.
Credit: Dragonfly FRO
“This is an ambitious effort to build something astronomers have long wanted: a practical way to directly see the cosmic web glowing in space, and to get it done in years rather than in decades,” said Roberto Abraham, professor in the David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and associated faculty at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. “MOTHRA harnesses advances in optics, detectors, and computing to open an entirely new window on the Universe. There’s nothing else like it.”
MOTHRA is the successor to the Dragonfly Telephoto Array, developed by Abraham and by Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University and deployed in New Mexico. The project was made possible with seed funding from the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, and with the Institute’s continued support.
Dragonfly was designed to exploit the extraordinary anti-reflection coatings of modern telephoto lenses, allowing astronomers to detect structures far fainter than conventional telescopes can see. Since its commissioning, Dragonfly has discovered new classes galaxies and ghostly stellar structures, including Dragonfly 44, a galaxy roughly the mass of our own Milky Way but composed of 99.9% dark matter, and NGC1052 DF-2, a galaxy seemingly devoid of any dark matter at all. These discoveries have ignited a resurgence of interest in the ‘low surface brightness Universe’ made up of large and faint objects that are difficult to study with conventional telescopes.
MOTHRA represents a dramatic leap forward in this area. By combining 1,140 lenses, the array will achieve the light-gathering power of a 4.8-meter telescope, making it the largest all-lens telescope in the world. This light gathering power is combined with a field of view much larger than that achievable with conventional telescopes, making the array at least an order of magnitude more powerful than its nearest competition.
The new instrument also introduces a first-of-its-kind distributed-aperture hyperspectral design, using tilting specialized ultra-narrow bandpass filters, giving it fine wavelength resolution over a wide range of wavelengths. This allows MOTHRA to isolate the faint glow of hydrogen gas in intergalactic space.
“MOTHRA is a telescope designed around a single idea: maximize discovery space for the dim glow of intergalactic gas,” said van Dokkum. “The combination of a huge effective aperture, wide field, and tunable ultra-narrowband filtering opens a new observational regime.”
The new telescope’s primary goal will be to detect the ultra-faint gas between galaxies that traces the distribution of dark matter. This gas outlines the “cosmic web”, a vast and complex network of structures seeded shortly after the Big Bang and stretched across billions of light-years as the Universe expanded. MOTHRA will not only reveal where this gas lies, but also how it flows along the filaments of the web.
Credit: Dragonfly FRO
To scale the project from Dragonfly to MOTHRA, Abraham and Dokkum created Dragonfly FRO, a new Focused Research Organization (FRO) dedicated to building the telescope. FROs are non-profit companies that operate with the speed and focus of technology startups, aiming to solve scientific bottlenecks and build high-impact research infrastructure within a defined multi-year timeline.
The launch of Dragonfly FRO and MOTHRA was done in partnership with Convergent Research and has been made possible through a donation from Alex Gerko, the founder and CEO of XTX Markets , a world-leading algorithmic trading firm based in the UK.
“Alex’s impact on this project extends well beyond funding,” said van Dokkum. “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.”
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. To learn more about Dragonfly FRO and the MOTHRA telescope – including its mission, technical approach, and updates – visit mothratelescope.org.
About the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics
The Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics in the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto is an endowed research institute with over 80 faculty, postdocs, students, and staff, dedicated to innovative technology, groundbreaking research, world-class training, and public engagement.
The research themes of its faculty and Dunlap Fellows span the Universe and include optical, infrared and radio instrumentation, Dark Energy, large-scale structure, the Cosmic Microwave Background, the interstellar medium, galaxy evolution, cosmic magnetism and time-domain science.
The Dunlap Institute, the David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, and other researchers across the University of Toronto’s three campuses together comprise the leading concentration of astronomers in Canada, at the leading research university in the country.
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Ilana MacDonald
Public Outreach, Communications, and Events Strategist
Dunlap Institute, University of Toronto
About Dragonfly FRO, LLC
Dragonfly FRO, LLC is a focused research organization advancing new observational capabilities to study ultra-faint astrophysical structures, including the cosmic web of diffuse ionized gas connecting galaxies. Dragonfly FRO operates as a mission-driven organization assembling dedicated scientific and engineering teams to build high-impact, field-enabling capabilities over a focused multi-year timeframe.
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About Convergent Research
Convergent Research is a non-profit organization that brings together scientific founders and funders to design, launch and operate Focused Research Organizations (FROs) across a range of fields. Convergent Research’s FROs, like Dragonfly, are building pivotal infrastructure that bridges gaps to breakthrough scientific research, proving out a new operating model for science that enables a high level of team science and systems engineering for public goods creation.
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About Alex Gerko
Alex Gerko is Founder and CEO of XTX Markets. XTX Markets is a leading algorithmic trading firm which uses state-of-the-art machine learning technology to produce price forecasts for over 50,000 financial instruments.
Alex and XTX Markets are major philanthropic donors, supporting a wide range of initiatives in math and science education, research and talent (as well as classical music and the arts). In 2025, Alex donated $10 million to Lean FRO and Mathlib, and XTX Markets created a $31.5 million AI for Math Fund, together designed to strengthen open-source infrastructure for formal theorem proving and the use of AI in frontier mathematics research. In the field of astronomy, besides MOTHRA, working alongside Schmidt Sciences Alex is co-funding the construction of the Argus Array, a massive new telescope system being developed at the University of North Carolina. Alex also donated $2.5 million to complete and deploy two key instruments at the CCAT Observatory, which houses the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope.
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