Top Ten Gravitational lens Candidates
from Medium Deep Survey
and other WFPC2 observations in the
Hubble Space Telescope Archive.

MDS idObservedModelResidual
HST 14176+5226
u26x8:0009
HST 12531-2914
urz00:0035
HST 14164+5215
u26xi:0017
HST 15433+5352
uvd01:0014
HST 01247+0352
uci10:0034
MDS idObservedModelResidual
HST 01248+0351
uci10:0050
HST 16302+8230
urg01:0042
HST 16309+8230
urg01:0010
HST 12368+6212
uhdfk:0056
HST 18078+4600
uqc00:0029
Click on MDSid link for each object to see a table of parameter estimates of Maximum Likelihood model fitted to images in each observed HST WFPC2 filter

For Press coverage on the WFPC2 HST lens discoveries click.

Ratnatunga, K. U., Griffiths, R. E. & Ostrander, E. J. 1999,
The Top Ten List of Gravitational Lens Candidates from the HST Medium Deep Survey
Astronomical Journal 117 2010-2023 . astro-ph/9902100

The observed regions cutout from HST WFPC2 images are 64 pixels of of the CCD or 6.4 arc seconds on a side.
All of the color images above were created using a fixed algorithm to transform the observed single filter F814W(R), F606W(G) and when available F450W(B) to color JPG. Although the color balance is probably not as pretty as images that may be created using interactive software procedures, these images can be inter-compared more realistically.
Note however that the color of the lensing galaxies are not yellow at the center but a bright red. The yellow produced by color saturation is used to indicate brightness to otherwise flat images.

To visualize gravitational lens configurations try out the interactive online WFPC2 HST lens image creator.

This cgi driver was written in FORTRAN back in 1999 at Carnegie Mellon University. After I retired back to Sri Lanka, virtual-universe.org was hosted at bluehost.com from 2006 July. After Bluehost stopped support of FORTRAN in 2019 October it was moved to a VPS on AWS, which was setup for me by Gayan Sirimana. It was recompiled using gfortran and activated on 2020 January 23rd. It is probably the only cgi written in FORTRAN

For more information on Gravitational lenses please also look at

Comments: E-mail kavan@astro.phys.cmu.edu - Kavan's Home page.