It seems exceedingly strange to have battled so hard about statistics when direct photographic evidence of physical connections between quasars and low-redshift galaxies has existed all along. We saw one example of this in Figure 1-3. But here I will recount briefly the saga of a much more famous case, the greatly tortured history of the galaxy NGC 4319 and its nearby companion.

The story begins with the astronomer called Markarian who surveyed the sky for objects with strong ultraviolet continuum radiation using a small Schmidt telescope in Armenia. He found among his hotly radiating objects the quasar-like object, called Markarian 205, close to the edge of a spiral galaxy. Daniel Weedman obtained spectra and announced that it had a redshift of z = 21,000 km s−1. But the galaxy only had a redshift of z = 1,700 km s−1.

Naturally, I was interested whether any effects were visible in the two objects which might give direct evidence that they were close to each other in space. To make sure, I took the deepest photograph possible, using the high-detectivity Illa-J film that Eastman Kodak had manufactured especially for astronomy. It required a four-hour, sky-limited exposure at the prime focus of the 200-inch reflector at Mt. Palomar. When I developed the photograph I was surprised and excited to find a luminous connection between the quasar and the galaxy. Naturally, the first thing I did was to ask myself whether this could be some kind of artifact, or was it a real luminous connection.