After imaging M13, I wanted to have the Seestar S50 find 3c273 for me. Unfortunately, it was more difficult than it should have been.

The Seestar S50 has a nice catalog of DSO Goodies for casual journeys though the wonders of the sky. But it currently has no way to allow direct entry of RA and Dec. And when the star field is dim with no bright stars nearby, it becomes a challenge to start-hop to the target region. That was the case for 3c273, which is a 12.9 magnitude object, surrounded by even fainter stars. We only have a 0.7 x 1.2 degree FOV.

So on my third try last night I finally nailed it the hard way... There was also a light breeze last night, and the little Seestar S50 doesn't hold up well against any kind of wind. There were lots of dropped frames last night when the AI on board the Seestar determined that the images had too many star trails. I can't complain about the dropped frames. Just know that it will perform much better if you can shield it against the breeze.

This final capture was performed with no filters, apart from the ever present IR blocking filter on the sensor. My sky is Bortle 6 and the sky meter showed a limiting magnitude overhead of around 18. The Moon wasn't in the sky last night - this week may be the very finest observing session for the year. The raw Bayered subs were imported into PixInsight for deBayering, alignment, and stacking. Then color corrected against the GAIA database.

3C273 made Astronomy History back in the 1960's when Maarten Schmidt obtained the first visual spectrum from the formerly identified bright radio source, integrating its light for 20 hours on the Mt Palomar 200 inch. At the time, it was the first known Quasar to have an optical counterpart. The red shift was an astounding 0.158 - making it the farthest known object at the time. Today, that's peanuts compared to what the Web Telescope has been finding. But the excitement over the huge red-shift and the work of Maarten Schmidt is what inspired me as a youngster to go into Astronomy for a career. More than 60 years ago today...

So I just had to give 3c273 a try...