Distance Bragging rights: 4C 71.07

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Sun, 03/07/2021 - 17:24

As a fun thing I was randomly looking for distant but still  kind of bright objects of HEN interest that already have AAVSO observations logged, and found 4C 71.07 a.k.a S5 0836+71 

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=4C+71.07

This is a quasar at redshift 2.2ish , which means that the redshift is so extreme that photons passing our Ic filters were emitted as UV radiation by the quasar. And those photons began their journey to our telescopes long, long before our sun was even born. However at 16...17 ish mag, it's very accessible to small telescopes. 

I found a few observations in the AAVSO database, the most recent from Nov 2020 but with huge gaps  The were no usuable com stars available, but hankfully HQ now created a sequence for it so the observations can continue with "standard" comp stars. It's not something that needs a close watch NOW, burI plan to build myself a list of QSOs to check once in a while and this seems easy enough...and gives distance bragging rights.  

This object has received some attention by the pros , including joint observations from Earth and the Russian space radio telescope Spektr-R  before it died in 2019.  https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2020/09/aa35168-19/aa35168-19.html

 

This forum is also a place to talk about your own HEN objects, so please feel free to open threads on objects you find interesting, for whatever reasons!

CS

HB