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Dragonfly

[PXL_20221118_165758669-1-226x300]

Grad student Seery Chen connects cables to a power supply on the
Dragonfly telescope in New Mexico, in November of 2022. Credit: Seery
Chen.

Dragonfly is an innovative, multi-lens array designed for ultra-low
surface brightness astronomy at visible wavelengths. Commissioned in
2013 with only three lenses, the array is growing in size and proving
capable of detecting extremely faint, complex structure around
galaxies.

In 2022, the Dragonfly team completed 70 per cent of its ultrawide
survey, which will map out the full footprint of sloan digital sky
Survey when complete.

An expansion of an additional 120 lenses is currently underway in
2023.

According to Cold Dark Matter (CDM) cosmology, structure in the
Universe grows from the "bottom up", with small galaxies merging to
form larger ones. Evidence of such mergers can be seen in faint
streams and filaments visible around the Milky Way Galaxy and the
nearby M31 galaxy.

But the CDM model predicts that we should see more of this structure
than is currently observed. However, images obtained using even the
largest, most advanced telescopes today contain scattered light that
may be hiding this faint structure. Dragonfly is designed to reveal
the faint structure by greatly reducing scattered light and internal
reflections within its optics. It achieves this using
commercially-available Canon 400mm lenses, with unprecedented
nano-fabricated coatings with sub-wavelength structure on optical
glasses.

Also, Dragonfly images a galaxy through multiple lenses
simultaneously--akin to a dragonfly's compound eye--enabling further
removal of unwanted light. The result is an image in which extremely
faint galaxy structure is visible.

The  co-principal-investigators for Dragonfly are U of T's Professor
Roberto Abraham and Yale University's Professor Pieter van Dokkum. 

instrumentation

  * CHIME/CHORD
  * CIRADA - Canadian Initiative for Radio Astronomy Data Analysis
  * Dragonfly
  * GIRMOS - Gemini Infrared Multi-Object Spectrograph
  * South Pole Telescope 3G
  * Spectrographs

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