Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Boötes (Boo)  ·  Contains:  The star 4 Ser  ·  The star 6 Ser
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3C 273 with jet, Freestar8n
3C 273 with jet, Freestar8n

3C 273 with jet

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
3C 273 with jet, Freestar8n
3C 273 with jet, Freestar8n

3C 273 with jet

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Description

This is quasar 3C 273 with jet imaged from Melbourne, Australia with EdgeHD11 at f/10.  56 x 5m exposures with C filter and ASI1600MMPro, 0.28" per pixel.

This is the first quasar identified with a large redshift, and it required the Palomar 200" to image the jet at the time, around 1962-3.  Two short papers were published in Nature about the discovery in 1963 by Maarten Schmidt and J. B. Oke, available  here.  A nice summary of the discovery is here and it shows the image from the 200".

It's now about 60 years since the discovery and it's now possible for amateurs to image the jet from their backyards.  There are a few other examples here in Astrobin.  It requires fairly good seeing and a dark sky, but I have fairly strong light pollution at 18.5 mag per arc-sec^2 so I needed many exposures.  fwhm's ranged from about 1.6" to 2.8" during the two evenings of imaging, and all exposures were used in the stack - with a continuous run on each night and 100% yield.

This image has no processing, sharpening or denoising and just has levels applied in photoshop.

The astrobin plate solve is wrong and it shows the wrong location and pixel scale.  This is 0.28" per pixel.   Not sure how to fix the astrobin info.

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3C 273 with jet, Freestar8n