by Jamie Dillon
It was a big deal to me. For years, long before I even thought about wanting a scope, I knew there was one quasar that medium amateur scopes could find. Last year, the Orion Nebula and M13 were the major wishes with a first scope; this year right on top of the list was 3C273.
This past week I'd gone thru the guides; sure enough that hipster saint Robert Burnham has an exact finder chart under Virgo. At LSA, took a half hour to run the field down. No bright stars in the neighborhood, sighting off of NGC 4536. Time well spent. Most of the next hour I stared at that little point of light. 3 billion light-years away. The most distant thing I'll see in this telescope. By Kingsley's scale, life here was algae and bacteria then, in the big soup.
Ken Head put it succinctly, "So that was back before I Love Lucy."
It was admittedly fun to say out loud, "Anybody wanna see a quasar?"
Since I was little I've read tons of astronomy, and I remember in the early 60's how quasars were all the rage, except no one had the blindest clue what they were. Pulsars were more interesting to read about, with models developing.
Several people asked what they were seeing, so I'll quickly say that it's like a much younger version of Jay's triumphant find, a jet off a supermassive black hole. Back in those old days, there was heaps more stuff spiralling into the discontinuity, so it put out a broad band of unimaginable energy, visible light at absolute mag -27. The foreground Milky Way star next to it was dimmer. I'm still haunted by that image.