Animated view of sky field and distant filament

This is an image of the entire sky field near the quasar Q 1205-30 as observed through the blue filter. The quasar is marked by a red hexagon while the LEGOs are indicated by yellow hexagons. A total of eight objects at redshift 3.04 are identified. One is located in front of the quasar and was found by means of its absorption of the quasar light, while the seven other objects were identified by their Lyman-alpha emission. As explained in the text, all these objects are found to lie inside a thin filament, here visualized in an animated GIF-display. Almost all of the other objects seen in this deep image are either stars in the outskirts of our own Milky Way galaxy or faint galaxies lying between us and the distant filament.

Technical information: this image is based on 13 400-sec exposures in a B(lue) optical filter, obtained with VLT ANTU and the multi-mode FORS1 instrument in March 2000. The seeing was 0.7 - 1.0 arcsec and the field measures 6.8 x 6.8 arcmin 2. North is up and East is left.