Canon USA is offering 120 EF 400mm F2.8 lenses to expand Dragonfly Telephoto Array: Digital Photography Review

Canon USA has announced that the company will provide technical support to Project Dragonfly, an international research group from Yale University and the University of Toronto, as part of its expansion plan. Dragonfly Telephoto Array.

The Dragonfly Telephoto Array is a telescope concept designed to capture images of extremely faint structures in the night sky. The structures are believed to provide insight into the distribution and nature of dark matter.

Canon USA will provide a group of 120 large aperture super telephoto lenses Canon EF 400mm F2.8L IS II USM. Canon Inc. will also provide technical support. The telephoto array currently includes 48 Canon EF 40mm F2.8L IS II USM lenses that were awarded to the group in 2013 and 2015. The lenses are arranged in two clusters of 24. The addition of 120 primes would raise the bar considerably. List the possibilities of arrays.

Canon EF 400mm F2.8L IS II USM

According to Canon, the 168 lenses will create a telescope array with ‘light-gathering capacity equivalent to a 1.8m-diameter refracting telescope with a focal length of only 40cm.’ It will be interesting to see what the team can explore with the larger telescope array and improved capabilities. In 2016, the team discovered the super-diffusion galaxy Dragonfly 44. In 2018, they identified a galaxy lacking dark matter, NGC 1052-DF2.

Dragonfly Telephoto Array installed in New Mexico – Photo by Pieter van Dokkum, Yale University

Canon adds, ‘Canon is committed to contributing to the advancement of science and technology by leveraging the technological power it has developed as a leading imaging company.’

The ‘Dragonfly Telephoto Array is the preeminent survey telescope for finding faint, diffuse objects in the night sky. It has allowed us to explore super-diffusion galaxies and other low-surface luminosity phenomena — rendering images that give us a deeper understanding of how galaxies form and provide insights important about the nature of dark matter. The original array was equipped with 48 Canon EF 400mm telephoto lenses with an anti-reflective coating that minimized the effects of light scattering, overcoming the limitations of conventional telescopes in detecting blurry structures. The lenses are combined with a monolithic wide-field detector that allows for excellent error control” said Professor Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University.

Photo taken with Dragonfly Telephoto Array. Moon shown to scale – Image by Pieter van Dokkum, Yale University

Van Dokkum continued, ‘With the addition of these 120 lenses, in a newly developed configuration allowing the use of ultra-narrow filters, the Dragonfly will be the most powerful wide-field spectral line mapper available today. The main goal of the next iteration of the Dragonfly array is to detect and study the faint gas that is thought to exist around and between galaxies. By opening this new window on the universe, Dragonfly will address some of the most important questions in astrophysics today. ‘