Einstein Cross (KuriousGeorge)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Pegasus (Peg)

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Einstein Cross

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Einstein Cross

2nd of 3 September objects.

Shown here is my attempt to image the very difficult Einstein Cross. The cross itself is a Quasar, 8 Billion light year's distant, having its light bent into 4 points by the foreground galaxy's gravity (400 million light year's distance). This is visual proof of Einstein's theory about gravity being able to bend light. What you see here has also been simulated mathematically and it expected.

Unfortunately the cross is only 1.6" in diameter. With the CDK24, I have a 2 micron spot size (assuming perfect seeing) on 9 micron pixels with 0.47" per pixel. With an 0.2" RMS max tracking error, I should be able to see the cross. But my best 16 300-sec luminance subs were around 2" seeing. Thus the "cross" stars overlap as you see here.

I'd need less than 1" seeing to clearly see the cross. But that is very rare with my exposure times and 4,200' altitude. I think I'd need to resort to planetary techniques to see this. That is, a CMOS video camera with magnification and <1 second subs. The best subs with a very short exposure should be less than 1" seeing (i.e., Lucky Imaging). I assume I'd need hundreds or thousands of exposures to do it. Looking forward to doing this in the future when the new hi-res CMOS cameras are available.

Unique or Unusal Deep Sky Targets

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3366754
PixInsight job	1G63PVDUN6G801H5Y96DOSHGDP53DN6L
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	22h40m30s.154
RA (top/left)	22h39m26s.605
RA (top/right)	22h41m31s.967
RA (bottom/right)	22h41m33s.697
RA (bottom/left)	22h39m28s.226

Dec (center)	+03°21′25″.49
Dec (top/left)	+03°05′50″.57
Dec (top/right)	+03°05′25″.61
Dec (bottom/right)	+03°37′00″.48
Dec (bottom/left)	+03°37′25″.67

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Einstein Cross

Einstein Cross

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Image Index:

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Einstein Cross

Einstein Cross

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