CITA@40 Conference

First Light with the MOTHRA Array

Not scheduled

20m

McLennan Physical Laboratories (60 St. George St.)

Oral

Speaker

Roberto Abraham (University of Toronto)

Description

We present first light imaging from MOTHRA, an experiment designed to directly image the circumgalactic medium and the brighter pockets of the Cosmic Web in the nearby Universe. MOTHRA is an array of 1140 high-end telephoto lenses equipped with tiltable ultra-narrow interference filters. The array will be about 50% completed at the time of this meeting, and it has begun to take science data while under construction. The system will be optically-equivalent to a 4.8m f/0.08 refractor with a six+ square degree field of view, operating as an R=800 integral field spectrometer. Over wide areas of the sky, its line mapping sensitivity is at least an order of magnitude deeper than any other facility on earth, or in space.