![]() ![]() 1000 of these nights were staffed by our collaboration, and we have used 500 nights of public data from the Dark Energy Survey. Mayall Telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, and the Bok Telescope at the same site in Arizona. These three telescopes are the Victor Blanco Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, the Nicholas U. These telescopes were chosen because they combine large collecting area with the ability to see large swaths of the sky. Three telescopes were used for a combined 1500 nights to collect the data shown in these images between 20. Einstein predicted such a thing in 1936, but wrote “there is no hope of observing this phenomenon directly.” He didn’t know at the time that there would galaxies with massive enough gravitational forces, nor that we would be conducting such large surveys to identify such rare phenomena. The red galaxy in the center is a massive galaxy, and the blue ring around it is a more distant galaxy whose light has been bent around it by gravity. We haven’t put much effort into improving our images around these bright stars since they only compromise a small fraction of our data, and we’re most interested in the much fainter galaxies.Ī strong gravitational lens as seen in our images The rotated plus signs are diffraction spikes of light on the telescope support structure. The horizontal lines are from “bleed trails”, when a bright object has saturated our detectors and electrons overflow into adjacent detector pixels. Rather than looking like a point, it has severely saturated our cameras, some of the color layers are missing, and you can see dozens of out-of-focus “ghost” images that look like donuts. The brightest star in our image is Arcturus. There are also, unfortunately, some reflections between our telescope lenses that create “ghost” images of the brightest stars. They’re not points because of blurring by the Earth’s atmosphere, optical distortions in the cameras, and something called the “ diffraction limit” which limits the resolution of any camera, telescope or microscope. Stars (other than our own Sun!) are far enough away that they should appear as points, or single pixels, in these images. Two of the colors (blue and green) are similar to the colors that your eyes can see, but our third color was taken in a redder red than your eye can detect (infrared). We combined data in three different colors, much as the human eye does. Stars and galaxies do have different colors, as you can see in these images. The Coma Cluster of galaxies, with two massive elliptical galaxies in the core and thousands of smaller galaxies ![]()
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