The image below is a 24 hour exposure using my Meade 12″ SCT and ASI2600mc cooled camera. I took this over 6 near moonless nights in late March and late April. It could use another 24 hours but I don’t think I’ll get to that this year! Below that is a zoomed view of the gravitational lens with just a hint of the Cheshire Cat smile. The two eyes are the galaxies SDSSCGB 8842.3 and SDSSCGB 8842.4 and the “smile” is a set of 4 lensed galaxies.  Red shifts of z>2 puts them at a distance of more than 10 billion light years away! Lastly the image below that is the Hubble image just for comparison with mine.

About gravitational lenses:
Einstein in 1915 formulated the general theory of relativity which described gravity as a geometric property of space time, in simple words gravity bends space time, so if light would travel across a region with intense gravity, it would bend along the space time. This was proved photographically when powerful telescopes discovered warped arcs of light in deep space which were discovered to be gravitationally lensed galaxies. The arcs were thus dubbed “Einstein rings”. The phenomenon works similar to how light is warped when viewed through an optical lens, instead in this case the analogue to an optical lens is a massive galaxy which acts as a gravitational lens. The massive galaxy has such an intense gravitational influence that light from galaxies much further behind it gets lens and warped around it.