[5] Those beams were too broad to produce coordinates precise enough to allow the radio source to be matched with a corresponding faint optical counterpart.

In 1962, 3C 286 was observed with the higher frequency two-element interferometer at Owens Valley Radio Observatory, which produced improved source coordinates with a precision of ~10 arc seconds.

With the new coordinates, observations at the Palomar Observatory allowed the optical counterpart to be unambiguously identified: a magnitude 17.25 object with a star-like appearance.

[7] 3C 286 is a Compact Steep Spectrum (CSS) source, which means that its size is less than 15 kiloparsecs (13.7 in the case of 3C 286), and the observed spectral flux density is proportional to να, where ν is the frequency and α ≤ -0.5 (in the case of 3C 286 α ≈ -0.61).

[8] High resolution images made at 8.4 GHz with the Very Large Array show that 3C 286 has a jet about 2.6 arc seconds long extending west-south-west from the core, and a counter jet extending 0.8 arc seconds east from the core.