The Cosmic Horseshoe Gravitational Lens

Image Title: The Cosmic Horseshoe

Copyright: Justus Falk, Lenny Tomczak

Date image was taken: April 27, 2025

Location: Tetenhusen, Schleswig-Holstein, Northern Germany and near Hamburg, Northern Germany

Data Acquisition Method: Personal Telescope Setup

If other selected: This image was made in a collaboration of two people with the same telescope.

Image Description and Details: This is a 50-hours deepfield-image of the Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens captured with amateur-grade telescopes.
My good friend Lenny and I spent months capturing a stunning deepfield-image of a small galactic system found in the constellation of Leo. What happens here is that a really, really massive galaxy in the foreground with a very strong gravitational field is distorting the light of a galaxy behind it. This causes the galaxy in the background (the distorted galaxy) to appear like a ring.
These phenomena are photographed very rarely. And that is why we really wanted to try to push our telescopes to their limits and capture it. And as you can see, we were successful.

For this image, we captured around 630*300 seconds exposure time in total at gain 120.

Equipment Details: We used two Lacerta Photonewton Telescopes with 250mm arperture and 1000mm focal length, which were mounted on an EQ6r Pro.
The cameras that had been used were the ZWO ASI294MC Pro and the ZWO ASI 533MC Pro.

Name: Justus Falk