Roger Powell, maybe your ears were burning. And you know that emulation is the highest form of flattery. For a few years now I have been vaguely aware that it was possible for amateurs to capture the light of quasars from over a billion light years away. To register as even a spec of light in one of my images when it is that far away it has to be incredibly bright. Which quasars are. It is estimated that this one is over 4 trillion times more luminous than the sun. Which seems like, you know, a lot.
Roger did all the leg work on identifying this object as a prime candidate and I am knocking him off shamelessly. But it is an honest tribute to him. Roger is one of the founding members of the Macarthur Astronomical Society in Sydney, Australia. So such a thing is not his first rodeo. You can see his blog on capturing this, his first quasar, here.
The green arrow points to the quasar. Just like Roger, I offer the star chart below from Aladin as proof. Compare the two images and you can see I got the suspect. This quasar is known to have a visible jet stretching out 200,000 light years away from the arrow. If you click on my image and look at it full scale, with your eyes squinted, the lights down low, and your head tilted just so, you might be able to see it. Or maybe I am up in the night.
It took a couple nights to get the subframes for my image. It was smokey from wildfires already in June in Torrey plus I was having trouble tracking to get round stars. In the end I had about 2.6 hours of luminance only frames.
3C 273, as Roger surely knew, is the brightest quasar as seen from earth and is a wowsy 2.4 billion light years–or gigalight-years as it is called in astronomy–out there.
Even though we are able to take pretty pictures, much of amateur astronomical observing is about imagination. The quasar is only a dot in my photo but the light that made it is a serious chunk of the age of the universe away, the black hole at its center is about the weight of a billion suns, and it was (2.4 billion years ago) in some mega violent process of forming a galaxy. All in that dot.
Imagine.
Hi Mark,
I’m very happy to learn that my earlier post nudged you towards producing this great image.
I’m blushing from your kind words and attribution – but I also suspect that you could teach me a bit about astro-photography!
As you so rightly imply, amateur astro-photography is not only about taking images of the most colourful nebulae which neatly fit into the field of view of our instruments. It is also about hunting down some of the smaller objects, the more distant globular clusters, the remote planetary nebulae and those which – like Quasar 3C273 – tell the story of science and cosmological evolution but which may not always produce the most striking impact when imaged.
Regards from Oz,
🙃
Roger