TL;DR: Andromeda's Parachute gravitational lensed quasar.

For a long time, I have only seen these nebulae... hydrogens... oxygens.

This time something compleetly different.

I was fascinated by the images of bent galaxies from JWT caused by gravitational lensing. I was wondering if there are objects where this phenomenon can be captured with amateur equipment. It turned out that they weren't that spectacular, but they were there.

Gravitational lensing is a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity. In short: it involves the bending of light rays in a strong gravitational field. For years treated as a curiosity, today it is a very important tool in the hands of physicists and astronomers, allowing us to better understand principles of the universe. The source of lensing is usually massive galaxies or groups of galaxies, and the final shape of the image depends on the components and geometry of the system.

I came across an article about a quasar [J014709+463037] called Andromeda's Parachute as appearing as four separate points, (https://www.deepskycorner.ch/obj/j014709+463037.en.php). This object was, quote: "serendipitous discovered", on images from the Pan-STARRS1 system (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/aa7aa6) by Ciprian Berghea in 2016.

A quasar is a type of very active galaxy. Inside it, there is a massive black hole (much larger than the one in our Milky Way), and the matter orbiting nearby emits huge amounts of energy.

A bit about our parachute:

There is a galaxy 7 billion light years away, the mass of which causes to bend the light coming from the quasar to us from a distance of 11 billion light years (!).

To illustrate:

- the closest star to us, Proxima Centauri, is approximately 4.2 light years away;
- the Andromeda galaxy - 2.5 million light years away;
- the diameter of the visible universe is about 92 billion light years.
So we went quite far.

The geometry of the lense system makes us see the object as three brighter points and one weaker point, resembling something like a parachute.
I thought, why not to try... there is a full moon, an object is high, some clouds, in the middle of the city, a tiny object, whatever!

After a sleepless night and the data processed to the limits, there was no end to the joy! Three dots appeared and a fourth one was nearly visible. It could probably be done better, with better seeing, in a darker place. But it's not always about being perfect .