"Andromeda's Parachute" is also J014709+463037, a quadruple lensed quasar in Andromeda. It was first discovered in images captured by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii. Observations with the Keck telescope show that the lensed quasar is a a redshift/distance of z=2.78 with a lensing galaxy around z=0.5. Depending on the cosmological model you like, this is a light travel time of 11 billion years (11 billion light years distant), see
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CosmoCalc.html for an interactive calculator. The "arc" part is actually three images, A, B, and C which together span about 3.8 arc seconds. The bottom of the parachute is a fourth lensed image at about 18th magnitude. The lensing galaxy is too faint to see. The discovery image resolves the four images fairly clearly. On this image, the field star FWHM is about 1.8 arc seconds. The image was taken using SharpCap's live stacking feature and stacking 11 second exposures, with some FHWM rejection, but because the A, B, and C components are so bright (about 15th magnitude), going down to 1 second would be preferable. The image was captured in SharpCap and "processed" in SAOImageDS9 using asinh stretch as the stretch algorithm. Pixel scale is about 0.6 arc seconds per pixel in the original.
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