May 192025
I briefly revived a piece of software I wrote last year, modeling the effect of multiple gravitational lenses. I long wanted to do this, it’s just a tad time consuming: to use my software for animations, I need to generate images one frame at a time.
What I wanted to do is an animation that shows what an actual galaxy (as opposed to a point source of light) would look like when lensed. The galaxy in question is NGC-4414:
Nice spiral, isn’t it. Well, here’s what we’d see if we viewed it through an imperfect alignment of four gravitational lenses:
I could watch this animation for hours.