The brightest quasar in visible light: 2.4 billion light-years away, magnitude ~12.9, and reachable with an 8-inch telescope. The farthest object a human eye can see directly.
ESA/Hubble & NASA · Original image and terms · CC BY 4.0. Web-sized reproduction.
Find it in Virgo.
How to see it tonight
Most objects in this part of the Sky Library are photographs, not naked-eye or telescope targets. 3C 273 is the exception. It is a quasar in Virgo, roughly 2.4 to 2.5 billion light-years away. It is faint, but genuinely reachable with a real backyard telescope.
Virgo climbs high in evening skies through northern hemisphere spring, and is well placed for southern observers too. At magnitude 12.9, 3C 273 needs a telescope of at least 8 inches of aperture and a reasonably dark sky. It is well past binocular range, and the naked eye has no chance at all.
Through the eyepiece it looks like nothing special: a dim, ordinary-looking star. It is indistinguishable at a glance from any faint star nearby. Identifying it correctly needs a star chart or an app, to confirm which point of light is the quasar.
3C 273 was the first quasar ever identified, by astronomer Maarten Schmidt in 1963. He worked out that its light was so extremely redshifted that the object had to be billions of light-years away. It remains the optically brightest quasar in the sky, powered by a supermassive black hole devouring matter violently.
That black hole outshines its entire host galaxy. The object also fires a jet of particles roughly 200,000 light-years long. Hubble and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have both photographed that jet separately. Amateur observers have followed 3C 273 since 1964, the year after its discovery.
That year, it became the first quasar ever logged visually by an observer. Its actual power is easy to lose in a distance figure alone. Move it to just 30 light-years away, roughly the distance of the nearest naked-eye stars. It would then shine as bright as the Sun.
What SkyLumi does
Search for 3C 273 and SkyLumi points the map at its real coordinates in Virgo. Aim your phone at that patch, or open AR to see it marked. That is the same spot a real telescope would point at.
Pinch in and the view moves into real observatory survey imagery of that patch, from Pan-STARRS, SkyMapper and DSS2. It shows the quasar as the faint point it actually is. A large telescope’s eyepiece view and the survey photograph agree: it looks unremarkable.
Night Vision keeps your eyes dark-adapted with a deep red display. No account, no ads. The core sky works offline; survey imagery needs a connection.
A few things to know.
Do I really need a telescope to see it?
Yes. At magnitude 12.9, 3C 273 is well beyond naked-eye and binocular range. An 8-inch telescope under a reasonably dark sky is the realistic minimum. Amateurs have logged it that way since 1964.
Why is this quasar special if it just looks like a faint star?
Its light left about 2.4 to 2.5 billion years ago, before complex life existed on Earth. It reaches your eye with no camera or processing in between. That direct, unaided path is what makes it unusual.
Who discovered it, and when?
Astronomer Maarten Schmidt identified it as a quasar in 1963. He recognized that its spectral lines were shifted far more than any known star’s. It was the first object of its kind confirmed.
Is 3C 273 the farthest thing a human eye can see?
Among objects seen directly through an eyepiece, rather than in a photograph, it is generally described as the most distant. Reaching it does require a telescope, not the unaided eye.
More in the Sky Library
Sources and image credit
Image attribution and original terms are linked beneath the image. Use of imagery does not imply endorsement of SkyLumi.