This is an extremely distant quasar called APM 08279+5255. It's 12.1 billion years ago, 87% of the way back to the beginning of time itself! Surprisingly, APM 08279+5255 is quite close to HS 0624+6907 in our sky, a tiny red 15th-magnitude object in the constellation Lynx. The other little faint fuzzy things in the picture (indictaed by unlabeled yellow arrows) are unnamed galaxies that are so tiny and far away that my software can’t identify them.

This quasar is pretty special. It is so unbelievably distant that we see it just 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang. It looks red in the photo, but really it shines almost entirely in X-rays that have been s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d o-u-t so far that they are barely visible as red to our eyes. Most of the radiation from APM 08279+5255 is actually in the infrared, but of course we can't see that either.

The word "QUASAR" was coined when I was a child as an acronym for "Quasi-Stellar Radio source." Quasars were originally detected as super-powerful radio beacons in the sky that showed up as tiny pinpoints of light in the most powerful telescopes of the day. When I first learned about them, nobody could quite figure out what the heck they were.

But science moves on, and I'm old. Now astronomers know that QUASARS are actually supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. They're also called by the more boring name "active galactic nuclei." The black holes gobble up ginormous amounts of gas and maybe even whole solar systems, and as the gas swirls into the vortex where time and space fold in on themselves it is superheated to millions of degrees by friction and screams out in wild bursts of X-rays that shine all the way across the universe! No, I am not making this up!

The radiance of a QUASAR outshines the combined brilliance of all the stars in the entire galaxy in which it feeds. The intensity of the radiation, and also the fact that it starts out as X-rays, is the reason we can see these things from the staggering distance of 12.1 billion light years.

APM 08279+5255 has a red shift of 3.911, which means that all of space and time between us and it has been s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d w-a-y o-u-t so that those killer X-rays got mellowed all the way down to comfortable IR with a little leakage into the reddest part of the visible spectrum. Every centimeter of space between now and then got bigger and bigger over time, so the waves got longer too.

Over the 12.1 billion years since APM 08279+5255 shot those X-rays toward an Earth that wouldn't exist for another 7.5 billion years, our two locations have been s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g apart faster and faster. It’s hard to get your head around but the “lookback time” of 12.1 billion years implies that APM 08279+5255 is now 23.6 billion light years from “here” (wherever that is)!

One last weird thing here. APM 08279+5255 is easily the most distant object that can be photographed with amateur backyard equipment. It’s so insanely far away that even a monster galaxy-eating black hole ought to be too dim for me to image. Luckily, there’s *another* ginormous galaxy partway out there in APM 08279+5255’s direction that just happens to lie on the same line of sight. This behemoth acts as a gravitational “lens” that focuses the light of APM 08279+5255 to a point and makes it WAY brighter than it would otherwise be.

130 x 15s each R,G,B with ASI 1600

C8 Edge HD with 0.7x reducer (FL=1494 mm) guided with OAG & ASI 174 mini

10Micron GM1000 mount

Captured with KStars on ubuntu

Processed in PixInsight on a mac

(See comments for a closeup)