The first deep sky telescope of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere is ready to shed new light on some of the darkest parts of the universe, as it begins surveys from western New South Wales.

Developed by Macquarie University, the Huntsman Telescope has been unveiled at Siding Spring Observatory, nestled among the mountains of the Warrumbungle Range near Coonabarabran.

Project team member Sarah Caddy said the design of the Huntsman allowed highly specialised research into galaxy formation and evolution.

"When we're looking for really faint objects, things with low surface brightness, we want to collect as much light as possible," she said.

"With traditional mirror-based telescopes, they can scatter the light into parts of the field of view that we don't want … it makes it really difficult to find those really faint things around galaxies.

"What we do instead is we have 10 lenses, all looking at the same spot in the sky. We stack those images together to get as much light as possible."

Built almost entirely from off-the-shelf technology, the "eyes" of the Huntsman are 10 commercially available Canon-built telephoto lenses.

It is similar in design to the Dragonfly Telescope Array designed by astronomers from Yale University, but there are none like it in the Southern Hemisphere.