http://www.iam.ubc.ca/~newbury/lenses/lenses.htmlMore in depth demonstrations and theory. They used gravitational lensing to take images of some of the first galaxies formed, I believe using an extremely dense galaxy as the lens, they achieved resolution something like 40x further than could normally be observed.
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/galaxies/lensing.html
Want to see some examples? http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/castles/
This technique of super dense objects warping light is also how they are detecting exo-planets. Microlensing instead of quasar or galactic lensing.
http://bulge.princeton.edu/~ogle/
I was just reading about how two amateur astronomers assisted in finding this one http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0505451 chart of it here http://www.arxiv.org/astro-ph/0505451. Grant Christie uses a 14"Celestron telescope in Aukland and Jennie McCormick used her 10" Meade LX200, a popular unit with astronomy buffs. Her SBIG ST-7E CCD camera isn't quite as common although it's down to about $5000 (I think it was about $12K when it became available). Her observations were from her farm in Pakuranga. She contributes an enormous amount of time to the Center for Backyard Astrophysics. http://cba.phys.columbia.edu/
Here is their story with a photo... she isn't geeky looking at all http://www.stardome.org.nz/news/microlense.html
It's amazing that with digital cameras and some software amateurs in their backyards are now doing research the Hubble wasn't capable of when it first went up. The amount of knowledge gained is accelerating at a tremendous rate with theories being proven or disproven at an incredible rate.
What an incredibly geeky topic :-)
