Makarian’s Chain

Image Details:

Astrophotographers often call Springtime “Galaxy Season” due to the numerous small galaxies visible in the sky during this time. As our solar system is angled about 60 degrees to the galactic plane, once the column of the Winter Milky Way has set the overhead skies have a nearly unobstructed view of the Virgo Cluster: a collection of galaxies all around 50-60 million light-years from here.

The bright galaxy near the lower left is called Messier 87. While it appears much like the galaxies on the right it is home to one one of the largest known supermassive black holes which was photographed in Radio light by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017. This galaxy also features a natural ‘Death Ray’ of sorts - a 5,000 light-year long stream of relativistic particles can be seen emanating from the galaxy’s core. This beam, which appears as little more than a blue smudge in the cropped photo below, has a calculated energy of roughly 10¹³ the amount of energy released by the entire Milky Way in ~1 second.

To the right of M87 is Makarian’s Chain, a near-linear string of galaxies - some of these galaxies have common motion (they are moving with low relative velocity and in proximity to each other) - though most galaxies seen throughout the photo are much further away.

Equipment:

• William Optics Star71-II Petzval APO (345mm Focal Length, F/4.9)

• ZWO ASI1600MM-P, ZWO Filters

• Celestron CGEM-II

• Autoguiding: Orion 50mm Guidescope + ZWO ASI224MC

Exposures:

• Luminance: 549 x 180” (Total: 27h 27m)

• Red, Green, Blue: 50, 50, 50 x 240” (Total: 10h)

Misc Details:

• Capture Software: AstrophotographyTool, PHD2 (guiding), Pegasus Powerbox (dew heater control, power management)

• Processing Software: PixInsight

• Taken from: Wichita, Bortle 5

• Capture Dates: 29, 31 March, 13, 17, 20, 25, 27-28 April, 2020

July 2022 Notes:

The original version of this image suffered from low SNR and odd color contrasts - I recall the data being seemingly difficult to work with despite a decent 37-hour total exposure. The contrast was poor, the background noisy, and the colors of many of the galaxies (particularly the fluffy, cloud-like Elliptical Galaxies) exhibited an inaccurate blue-yellow border on their fringes. With the benefit of another 2 years’ experience these problems have more or less disappeared. The new edit features much better contrast on the background - including background dust lit by the combined light of our Milky Way - and the color of the numerous galaxies is a much smoother yellow-to-grey.

Annotation