3C 273 and its jet

Over the new moon weekend in April, Howard Banich and I took a look at 3C 273 in Jimi's 48" -- along with a number of other targets (earlier post of the recoiling Black Hole or wierd LBV/Supernova in Mrk 177 in Off the Beaten Path). 3C 273 was discovered in 1959 as a radio source in the third Cambridge Radio Survey, but it was in February 1963 that Maarten Schmidt at CalTech figured out that the emission lines in this relatively bright stellar object were redshifted by 15% of the speed of the light (at that point considered shockingly large) -- implying 3C 273 is an extremely luminous object at distance of ~2.4 billion light years (using modern estimates for the Hubble constant). An optical gas jet emerges from the quasar and extends over 20" to the southwest. Structures and variations inside the jet have been studied over the years at several wavelengths. Although the quasar shines at 13th magnitude, the jet is a very tough visual object and a more challenging target than the famous jet in M87.

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We examined 3C 273 carefully at 700x, though unfortunately the seeing was somewhat soft. Fortunately, the quasar is very easy to identify as it forms the eastern vertex of a small triangle with a mag 13.4 star 0.9' W and a mag 14.8 star 1.3' SW (see the SDSS image). Also a mag 17 star is 30" NE -- and that is very helpful in identifying the jet! I had to wait for the seeing to settle, but a few times a thin spike (the optical jet) would briefly pop to the southwest [~15" length] of the quasar. The observation was confirmed by the configuration of the nearby stars -- the jet pointed directly away from the 17th magnitude star and pointed towards the mag 14.8 star to the southwest. Jimi also mentioned that the direction of the jet is slightly offset from the quasar itself, but my pops were too fleeting to confirm this orientation.

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