A "Twin" Quasar

November 08, 2026  •  Leave a Comment

Not the greatest image, but a pretty amazing phenomenon: the two dots are light from one very distant, intrinsically extremely bright object, a quasar (QSO) cataloged as Q0956+561. The QSO is way too far away to be resolved into anything but a faint point of light, but its light is distorted by the mass in a galaxy between it and us (not seen in this image), causing us to see it as two points, separated by a few arcseconds; an example of gravitational lensing.

The twin QSO is a whopping 8.7 billion light-years away (redshift z=1.41), while the intermediate lensing galaxy is at "only" 3.7 billion light-years (redshift z=0.355). It's the most distant object I've been able to image. The larger galaxy at lower left is much closer at 62 million light-years, and has nothing to do with the QSO or the lensing galaxy.

18 exposures, 300 sec. each (1.5 hr. total), 7 November 2026 from suburban Bloomington, Indiana.
GSO 8" f/8 RC OTA, Apertura 0.67x Reducer
ZWO ASI2600MC Pro cooled color CMOS camera
Auto-guided, Askar off-axis guider, ZWO ASI174MM Mini guide camera
ZWO EAF autofocuser
ZWO AM5N mount
ZWO ASIAir Plus controller

Processed in Astro Pixel Processor, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop

 


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