[SkyViking (Rolf)]

Originally Posted by DavidU

Now that's kewl Rolf

Thanks David

Originally Posted by AlexN

Impressive...

I remember reading a while ago that in the early days of General Relativity, People assumed that we could never prove or disprove the idea of gravitational lensing, then the HST came along, and imaged a gravitationally lensed galaxy cluster... People then said "you could not hope to use gravitational lenses from earth based telescopes" I believe Keck I was the first to prove otherwise, and now here you are, an amateur astronomer with a 10" Newtonian and a webcam imaging gravitationally lensed objects from your backyard..

Awesome.

Thank you Alex. It is great to be able to image this stuff. Admittedly we amateurs usually have the advantage that the research and cataloguing is already done and we 'only' have to point our scopes at the good stuff. Imagine seeing this speck of light for the first time and having to figure out what it is - modern science is amazing.

Originally Posted by mill

Whoohoo!!!! In 10 years we will be making pics with a mobile phone and pull loads of stuff out of space via gravitational lensing.
Top picture Rolf.

Thanks Martin. Yeah who knows how we might exploit general relativity in the future? I stumbled across an interesting article and discussion here: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=10123

Originally Posted by rogerg

Congrats, nice work, and interesting image I enjoy having projects such as you have here, it's nice to achieve something specific and interesting.

I once imaged a galaxy which appeared to be wrapped around a star in a 110 degree arc. Couldn't find any data on it to know if it was lensed or just co-incidental. There's so many things like that as an amateur astornomer where you just go "well, it looks like it, but no idea how to know for sure" and so it just ends there.

How did you go about finding your target? Do you know of a catalogue of lensed objects, or your just picked up on this one?

Thanks,
Roger.

Thank you Roger. Yes with some of these more obscure objects it can certainly be a challenge to find proper information about them. I don't know of a catalogue of gravitational lenses as such, I just looked around and found this one with a Google search. There are a number of others, but most have smaller angular separation so they would be a challenge to image.

Originally Posted by astroron

Very Impressive Rolf
Top Stuff

Thank you very much Ron.

Originally Posted by DeanoNZL

Nice one Rolf.
Putting our recent fine weather to good use.

Thank Adrian, yes it finally cleared up again didn't it

Originally Posted by bojan

This look like a REAL work
Not something that everybody else does.. congratulations, for the idea and for carrying it out !

Thank you very much Bojan.

Originally Posted by Terry B

Very good. The best I've done is a qso with a z=2.1
Very cool.

Thanks Terry, my record is Q1451-15 with a redshift of z=4.762: http://www.titirangiobservatory.com/.../q1451-15.html
I believe in the last few years some quasars with z=6+ have been discovered, now that would be far away... :O

Originally Posted by allan gould

Impressive shot and very well done - especialy with a webcam

Thank you very much Allan.

Originally Posted by Ric

That's pretty special Rolf, fantastic work.

Cheers

Thank you very much Ric.

Originally Posted by zipdrive

wow...coooool!

Thank you

Originally Posted by Garyh

yep, that is something special for us amateurs to capture for sure

Thank you Gary, yes it is pretty amazing that we can see this stuff at all.