The range of targets suitable for my telescope to provide good images comes to an end in March/April, the new astronomical season is often known as Galaxy Season. this is mostly because at this time of year on Earth at night we are looking out of our own Galaxy rather then during the Autumn and Winter months where we though it. Unfortunately wide field telescope that provides lovely images of the 'large' objects of such as nebula is pretty restricted when it some to viewing objects that are millions of light years away (there are one or two exceptions, Andromeda and Triangulum). One thing that I can show are the groups of gravitationally linked galaxies, the major one visible for my scope is on the boundary of Virgo and Coma Berenices. My target (possibly the final target I will have until early August) is a chain of galaxies known as the Markarian Chain.
Space is big....
The Markarian Chain group of galaxies is a stunning visual spectacle that can be observed from Earth with a good quality telescope.
This group is a collection of galaxies that are gravitationally bound to each other, forming a chain-like structure that spans several degrees in the sky. The Markarian Chain group is named after the Armenian astrophysicist, Beniamin Markarian, who first discovered this group in the 1960s.
The Markarian Chain group is part of the larger Virgo Cluster, which is a massive collection of galaxies located about 50 million light-years away from Earth. The Virgo Cluster is one of the closest galaxy clusters to our Milky Way, and it contains more than 2,000 galaxies. The Markarian Chain group is located on the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster, and it is composed of about 15 galaxies that are spread over a distance of about 7 million light-years.
The most prominent members of the Markarian Chain group are the galaxies NGC 4435 and NGC 4438, which are collectively known as the "Eyes." These two galaxies are interacting with each other, and their mutual gravitational attraction has distorted their shapes. NGC 4438, in particular, has a prominent tidal tail that extends for tens of thousands of light-years. This tidal tail is thought to have been created by the gravitational interaction between NGC 4438 and another galaxy in the past.
Other notable members of the Markarian Chain group include the galaxies NGC 4461, NGC 4473, and NGC 4477. These galaxies are elliptical in shape and do not show any signs of recent star formation. However, they contain large populations of old stars, which have been observed to have a high abundance of heavy elements. This suggests that these galaxies have gone through several cycles of star formation and enrichment over their lifetimes.
The Markarian Chain group is also home to a number of spiral galaxies, including NGC 4490 and NGC 4501. These galaxies have beautiful spiral arms that are filled with gas and dust, which are the raw materials for new star formation. NGC 4490, in particular, is interacting with a smaller galaxy, which is causing it to undergo a burst of star formation in its central region.
The Markarian Chain group is an excellent example of a galaxy group that is undergoing various stages of interaction and evolution. The mutual gravitational attraction between the galaxies is causing them to distort each other's shapes, trigger star formation, and exchange gas and dust.
Final image
I took this on the 24th April 2023, it is made up of 77 images each of 3 minutes giving a total exposure time of, 3h51m.
Because galaxies are "broadband" targets, meaning they given off light across the spectrum I took this with only a simple IR Cut filter in front of my cooled camera. Virgo never gets really high i the sky from my location in the UK and is in the light dome of Chesterfield so there has had to be a fair mount of post processing to remove the overlay light background.
If you have read to this part of the blog and have glanced at the plat solved version of this image you ill appreciate that there are many hundreds of Galaxies here some elliptical some spiral but all containing hundreds of millions (if not billions) of stars. Given the cluster as a whole contains 2000 galaxies let us say each galaxy contains 100 million stars, then in the cluster there's 200 billions stars.
Last minor fact that I picked up from wikipedia while researching the chain is that the Eye's Galaxy pair that you can see in the centre of the image contains the galaxy NGC 4438 which in the film "Interstellar" is the potential destination of the wormhole that is traversed.
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