were focusing on the event, by then designated "GRB 990123". The BeppoSAX satellite had also seen the burst, and pinned down its location to within a few arcminutes. This data was sent out, and four hours after the burst the area was imaged with the 1.52 meter (60 inch) Schmidt camera at Palomar Mountain in California. The image revealed a magnitude 18 optical transient that wasn't on archive images of the same area. The next night, the fading object, by now down to magnitude 20, was imaged by the Keck telescope, and the 2.6 meter Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Islands. The observations revealed absorption lines with a redshift of 1.6, implying a distance of 9 billion light-years. The Hubble Space Telescope performed observations on the location of GRB 990123, sixteen days after the event. It had faded by more than a factor of three million in that time. The Hubble was able to pick up the traces of a faint galaxy, whose blue color suggested it was forming new stars at a rapid rate. See also GRB 050509B References Further reading 990123 19990123 January 1999 events Boötes