11 billion years ago.....

[robin_astro]

...... a few photons set out from the recently discovered quadruple gravitationally lensed quasar J014709+463037 and ended their journey kicking out electrons in a chip of silicon attached to my C11/ALPY200 spectrograph. 

Here is the spectrum with an overlay of the confirming spectrum from the Keck telescope published here

https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.05873

The broad UV emission lines from Lyman alpha, Si IV and C IV have been shifted at z =2.4 into the visible.

 

Robin

 

[furrysocks2]

That's pretty cool!

[Joves]

That's better than just pretty cool. That's incredible! Well done Robin, that's about the farthest "sighting" I've seen in my interest in this hobby. To think, the universe was approximately 20% of its current estimated age when those little "photons that could" shot their way out to land on YOUR silicone chip!

[SteveA]

Blimey! I have to say that's one of the most fascinating things I've seen on here for a long while...I am also embarrassed have to admit that I hadn't once looked at this section of the forum, not sure why, but it looks mightily interesting.

Thanks for posting Robin

 

Steve

[SteveBz]

19 hours ago, robin_astro said:

...... a few photons set out from the recently discovered quadruple gravitationally lensed quasar J014709+463037 and ended their journey kicking out electrons in a chip of silicon attached to my C11/ALPY200 spectrograph. 

Here is the spectrum with an overlay of the confirming spectrum from the Keck telescope published here

https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.05873

The broad UV emission lines from Lyman alpha, Si IV and C IV have been shifted at z =2.4 into the visible.

 

Robin

 

Fantastic, Robin. What exposure time did you need for this and how did you strip out all the other interfering sources?  I guess just a very narrow slit, or whatever.

[robin_astro]

1 hour ago, SteveBz said:

What exposure time did you need for this and how did you strip out all the other interfering sources?  I guess just a very narrow slit, or whatever.

Hi Steve, 

The total exposure was 8x600s but the key features in the spectrum are visible in a single 600s exposure.  Yes it is a slit spectrograph which isolates a narrow (23um) strip of sky including the target, described here

http://www.threehillsobservatory.co.uk/astro/spectroscopy_20.htm

You still have to isolate the wanted star from any others which might be trapped in the slit and remove the spectrum of the sky background which includes light pollution and natural air glow.  I use Christian Buil's ISIS software to do all the data processing

http://www.astrosurf.com/buil/isis/isis_en.htm

You can see the raw spectrum image with and without the sky background subtracted below. (The slit can be seen on the left and the QSO is the bottom of the three spectra)

This was just a bit of fun really. The main use of this setup is to confirm and classify supernovae down to ~mag 17.  This is my latest classification

https://wis-tns.weizmann.ac.il/object/2017gjn

Cheers

Robin