Einstein's Cross and PGC 69457

[deepskyhunter]

Has anyone seen this illusive object? PGC 69457 seems obtainable visually in my 20"
but the lensing affect must be far outside my scopes reach.How much aperture would it take?

[Uwe Glahn]

I tried the Cross several times with 20" and 27".

When transparency is good, the PGC foreground galaxy is no problem with 20". With good seeing the cross can be seen as a stellar spot in the middle of the PGC. I could never separate the cross with 20" but I know about an positive separation with 20" under perfect skies.

With 27" (EQ platform), Seeing I, 1172x and NELM 7mag+ I could separate the cross into three points. I thing this was the upper limit for the aperture.

But I would be interested in the results of other observers, especially with bigger aperture.

[Howard B]

Hi Uwe, I've had much the same result with my 28 inch a few years ago - the galaxy was easy to see and I was able to see three points of the cross that were mostly smeared together because the seeing wasn't a steady as it could have been. But the sky was very dark (21.95 SQM) and I came away from that observation thinking that with steadier seeing I might have been able to see all four points of the cross.

[Jimi Lowrey]

I have seen all four components at once with my 48" reflector but only once and after many many tries. It took a night of of sub arc second seeing and 813X to bust up this small lens. I remember the first time I tried it with my old 25" that I was surprised at how small CGCG 378-15 is. From my experience with this elusive object it takes really hight power and super steady seeing. With my old 25" I only ever could see three of the components A B and C.

[reiner]

I have tried the Cross twice with 22" under acceptable seeing (otherwise I would not have tried :-( ). Both times I thought, whow, what a tiny galaxy and could only make out a central quasi-stellar object. I always thought that this is mostly the core of the foreground galaxy and not the quasar.

Can anyone of those who successfully split the quasar images from the core comment on the relative brightnesses of core and the quasar images? The Hubble image is not very useful in this regard, as it does not represent the visual part of the spectrum.