with M. B. Mackey and A. J. Shimmins, he observed the Moon’s sweeps across 3C 273 in April, August, and October 1962.

By the standards of the day, Hazard achieved an exceedingly accurate position for the radio source 3C 273. He detected a point radio source and a curious wisp of radio emission. Bolton communicated the position from the August 1962 observation by airmail letter to the head of radio astronomy at Caltech, Tom Matthews. House rules at Caltech required that the information should go to Maarten Schmidt, the accredited extragalactic observer. A photograph of the radio position showed a star of magnitude 13 together with a wisp or jet extending to 20 seconds of arc. Schmidt’s initial suspicion was that the star must be within the Milky Way and that the faint wisp was a peculiar galaxy. The object was so strange that he sensed astronomical glory awaited him as the first observer to solve the puzzle.

Immediately after Christmas 1962, on a sharp frosty night at Palomar, Schmidt secured his first spectrum of 3C 273 with the 200-inch. Unaccustomed to observing such bright objects (a thirteenth-magnitude “star”), he overexposed the plate. Nevertheless, the spectrum intrigued him because it showed emission lines in unexpected places. Two nights later, on December 29, 1962, he got the exposure time correct, securing spectra with seven emission lines. But this fingerprint could not be matched to any suspect. Schmidt later recalled that the puzzle resolved on the afternoon of February 5, 1963.²⁴ Cyril Hazard had written to him suggesting that the optical results should be published in the same issue of Nature as his radio position. Schmidt thought that a good idea and, while writing the manuscript, he reached for the glass slides of his spectra. For some reason he then decided to take the ratio of the wavelengths of the emission lines against the spectrum of atomic hydrogen.

The result stunned him. It was immediately obvious that he was looking at the spectrum of hydrogen, redshifted by 16 percent. This was a crazy result. Stars of thirteenth magnitude, those common or garden denizens of the Milky Way, are not meant to show such gigantic redshifts! Why had this star such a large redshift? And what was that wisp? Was it none other than a jet, just like the one that springs from the nucleus of the giant elliptical galaxy M87? The object was strange