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Astrophotography

My First Quasar, Even Before the First Quasar

Last month, I posted about the first quasar that I had ever knowingly photographed. My story was that while waiting for the galaxy NCG 4151 to rise high enough to capture two quasars, I spent a couple of hours photographing M97, the Owl Nebula. Well, today I was reading some posts on Cloudy Nights forums and found that there is an easy quasar by M97. I went back to my photos and sure enough, there it was. I have probably photographed lots of quasars and didn’t even know it. Now I have three different identified quasars.

And there it is, 8.5 billion light years, I am photographing light that left the quasar before our solar system even existed.

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