[GUS.K (Ivan)]

After seeing an article about this recently discovered quasar in a thread over on Deep sky forum, and with a predicted clear night (Tuesday the 5th march), I thought I'd give this one a go. Made up a few finder charts from wikisky and set up the 18 inch scope around 9.30pm. Seeing conditions were good and transparency was above average ( a good night for spiral arms) and with an SQM reading of 21.1 mpsas and at an elevation just over 1000 meters. Magnifications used were 310 and 450x. Starting from Beta Pictoris, I starhopped my way to 8.6 magnitude HD36477 (a star at the southern end of a rough semi circle of stars). From there I made my way to a 12.5 magnitude star near to the quasars location. The magnitude shown for the QSO on Wikisky is 16.8 V, but figures of 16 - 16.34 magnitude G have been quoted on some sites. I spent about a half hour or so on it, and using averted vision, was able to glimpse it a half dozen or so times. Every so often the nearby 16.95 magnitude star would pop in and out of view as well. It took a lot of concentration, hand tracking with a dob at higher powers is not the easiest thing to do, but using wider field eyepieces (76 degree AFOV in this case) made it a little easier to let the image drift with enough time to concentrate on the right spot with averted vision. The high red shift of Z=3.962 equates to a lookback time of somewhere around 12 Billion years give or take.
Thanks for reading.