Daily Image
21-03-2018
Strong Gravitational Lensing
| Submitter: | Albert van Duin |
| Description: | One of the things I always wanted to try is imaging a real gravitational lens with my small optical telescope. Not the ones like the Double Quasar, that was quite easy and I did that some years ago. No, my goal was to image distorted images (socalled Einstein rings) of distant galaxies, like the Hubble Space Telescope did: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1506a/ So I put the coordinates of this object into my database with photographical targets for my remote observatory in rural Germany. And during a clear and cold night, my automatic scheduler decided it was time to try, and the telescope was pointed towards the SDSSCGB 8842.3 and SDSSCGB 8842.4 galaxy pair in the constellation of Ursa Major. After only 6.5 hours of integration time, the arcs were faintly visible (with some image processing), much sooner than I expected. The image above (on the left) is the result of a stack of 25, 600s integrations with a clear filter, and 3 integrations each for red, green and blue with a 400mm telescope. On the right the HST image at the same scale. My full image can be found here: https://www.astrobin.com/full/333141/0/ If you want to search for the smiley face, it is almost exactly in the middle, but you will have to look hard at the full resolution image (knob on the top right) since it is very small, and rotated 90 degrees w.r.t. to the two images shown above. |
| Copyright: | astropix.nl |
| Tweet |  |