“MOTHRA is a telescope designed around a single idea: maximise discovery space for the dim glow of intergalactic gas,” said Pieter van Dokkum, co-founder of Dragonfly FRO – the body behind MOTHRA. “The combination of a huge effective aperture, wide field and tunable ultra-narrowband filtering opens a new observational regime.”
MOTHRA is being built at the 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 this year.
By fusing its many images together digitally, the array of telephoto lenses will be the equivalent of a single 4.7-metre diameter lens. It will be the world’s largest all-lens telescope. Dragonfly FRO said its capabilities 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.”