The Canon 5200mm super telephoto lens may be the world’s largest camera lens, but it’s no match for lenses the size of an entire galaxy, so massive that they deform the light of objects behind them. They’re called gravitational lenses.
That’s the case of LRG 3-757, which is producing this horseshoe Einstein Ring image. Generally, gravitational lensing results in two images, “but here the lens alignment is so precise that the background galaxy is distorted into a horseshoe.” A beautiful effect captured by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. [APOD]