Quasars ! For astronomers, quasars are undoubtedly very interesting cosmic objects, powered by huge black holes at the centers of extremely distant active galaxies (more on wikipedia). And because they are much brighter than entire galaxies, they are also the most distant objects I can find on my photos. For amateur astrophotographers, quasars are actually visually quite uninteresting things, just faint dots among thousands of others (normal stars). However, just registering the light that has reached our village after more than ten billion years of traveling through space can be (and for me really is) quite fascinating. It is of course not possible to recognize a quasar in a photograph, but it is necessary first to consult the SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) catalog, which now includes almost million of them. I looked at a few quasars that had already been discussed on various astronomy forums. I easily found them e.g. in my images of the Abell 1565 galaxy cluster in Coma Berenices, the M99 galaxy, and (two) near the M97 (Owl) planetary nebula. The light from the first two traveled to us for over 11 billion years, and from the quasars near the Owl Nebula for 5 and 9.5 billion years (red shifts for the first two z~2.7, for M97 z~1.2 and 1.6, respectively). When I looked at my favourite M74, right next to the galaxy I have also find a rather distant quasar with z=3.035.
Then I tried to take a closer look at my other photos of galaxies (I have many from the last ten years). And I was surprised to find (once I finally learned how to use the Aladin atlas with the SIMBAD catalog) that almost every image contains dozens of quasars (!!) with redshifts from up to 3. Only a few quasars have z > 3, and quasars with z > 4 are rather exceptional. In order not to overload this page, I show here quasars from which light was emitted at a time when the universe was less than 2 billion years old, i.e. (plus or minus) those with a redshift of > 3.4. All of them are located near some galaxy and are therefore relatively easy to find.
And here are (equally arranged) links to my images of galaxies with particular quasars: A2151 NGC2841 NGC5846 NGC 3628
M74
NGC7814
NGC521
NGC3486
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JKŽ, 2003 - 2025
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