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The "blob" she found turned out to be a rare type of astronomical object called a quasar ionization echo.
On Christmas eve 2008 I managed to image this object from my back garden in Beilen with my 200mm telescope and a Canon DSLR camera:
http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/index.html?main.php?date=20090102
The green blob is clearly visible.
Last spring I gave it another shot with a bigger telescope and a better camera, the result is shown above.
To assemble a true colour image, 3 hours worth of 600s integrations were made using LRGB filters and a cooled monochrome CCD camera on my 400mm telescope.
A lot of faint background galaxies can be seen in this image, to view the full image, please visit: http://www.astrobin.com/full/274013/0/
