"Thomas Matthews and prepared to... make some observations of a radio source they denoted 3C48... interested in... [the] visible light... on the night of September 26, 1960 they took a photographic plate of the area... Conventional wisdom... told them that they would find a cluster of galaxies... Instead... subsequent observations... and throughout 1961 showed... its spectrum of colors was highly unusual... its brightness and luminosity varied widely and rapidly... it was only "quasi" stellar. Hence the name quasi stellar radio source or ""... It was a remarkable year for general relativity, because it contained all the signs that a renaissance was about to begin. ...an era in which general relativity would become an active and exciting branch of physics, after almost a half century in the backwaters."