I know this looks like a blank field, but it isn't!
I've been trying to capture a decent image of a gravitationally lensed galaxy from my home on the edge of Vancouver, WA for a on and off, but haven't had good luck with seeing and transparency when I needed it. I finally bagged one in mid-March and post it here.
The object is nicknamed "The Clone". It was discovered in a search of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) for lensed galaxy arcs around foreground galaxies. A link to the discovery abstract can be found here:
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-ref?bibcode=2009ApJ...699.1242LThe lensing galaxy (probably a group of galaxies, actually) is magnitude 20.00(g) at a redshift of z=0.42243 or about 4.73 billion light years. The galaxy warped into an arc is magnitude 20.97(g) and at a redshift of z=2.00 putting it at about 11.2 billion light yeras, more than double distance from us to the lensing galaxy group. In the image, the lensing galaxy group appears reddish yellow, while the arc seems to have a slight blue tinge. You can see it to the left of center to the right of the brightish spiral 2MASX J12055790+5144480 (16.616mag(g), z= 0.08310, ~1.11 billion light years). If you have trouble spotting it, take a look at revision B of the image for an annotated version marking the location of the gravitional lens arc and a few quasars, just for fun.
Each of the 3 images combined for this image were 240 live-stacked 2 second exposures.
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