A string of bright galaxies around 50 million light-years from Earth that share common motion through space. The brightest two are called M84 and M86. Many more galaxies are far in the background, appearing much smaller and fainter. In total, there are at least 30 galaxies visible in this photo.
Version 2, reprocessed December 2022
From the Reprocessing Bonanza 2022. This version uses exactly the same data as version 1, but with better processing tools and skills. I remember finding this really tricky to process the first time around. It’s still a challenge to get detail in the small galaxies despite using a wide-field refractor. Still, BlueXTerminator in particular helped a lot, along with my being more careful with noise reduction.
Version 1, April 2021
Spring 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…
* April 2021
* Bristol, UK (Bortle 8)
* Telescope: Askar FRA400 f/5.6 Quintuplet APO Astrograph
* Camera: ZWO ASI 2600MC-PRO
* Mount: Orion Sirius EQ-G
* Guide: William Optics 32mm; ZWO ASI 120MM Mini
* Software: PixInsight, Photoshop, Lightroom
* Control: ASIAIR PRO
* 300 x 120 seconds
Total integration time: 10 hours
By Lee Pullen
Example source data
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