Markarian’s Chain

pring in the Northern Hemisphere is known as Galaxy Season because they’re the main targets visible. Unfortunately, galaxies are the toughest targets for my set-up of wide-field telescope in a city. Light pollution makes it a challenge to get any decent signal, and they’re so small that they appear as little more than small specks in my field of view. Makarian’s Chain is a string of galaxies that you actually need a wide-field telescope to image altogether though, so lacking any better targets I decided to give it a go.

The result is mixed… I don’t think that the quality is particularly good, although it’s good that anything’s visible through bright city skies. The integration time was 10 hours, before I fully embraced long integration times. With hindsight I realise I should have aimed for 20. That might have gotten me a better signal-to-noise ratio which is really needed for these faint fuzzies. Maybe I’ll get more data to add into the mix during a future Galaxy Season…