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Quasar

The vertical line points down to the object.

There is a finder chart on page 2101 of Burnham's Celestial Handbook. This photo is to roughly the same scale and orientation as the chart. I would like to hear from anyone who can actually see this object.

Quasars, discovered in the 1960s, are objects in the sky which look like stars (i.e. like points of light) but are much further away than any stars in our galaxy. (This means that they can't be part of our galaxy and must be at the same distances as far-away galaxies.) Some of them also emit radio radiation; the name "quasar" originally stood for QUasi-Stellar ("looks like a star") Radio Source but now is generally used to refer to even ones that don't emit radio waves.

So now I've told you what the name refers to, but what are these things? If they look as bright as stars but are millions of light- years away, they must be emitting enormous amounts of energy. The current theory is that the energy that lets quasars shine is gravitational energy released when matter falls into a massive (a billion times as massive as the Sun) black hole at the center of a distant galaxy. This theory has been strengthened by recent observations of "quasar host galaxies" by the Hubble Space Telescope.

There has been a lot of research done on quasars since their discovery and a lot of it has been done in Hawaii, on telescopes like the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and the new Keck telescopes. But there is much more to be done, and maybe you'll do some of it too!