Can You Spot All the Galaxies in This Virgo Supercluster Photo?

[Andy Resnick]

Virgo is favorably located right now (for me)- my goal for the next month or two is to stitch together a bunch of image stacks to get the entire region. Here's one 'frame' from last night, showing M84, M86, The Eyes, NGC 4388, 4402, 4461, 4458, 4477, 4459... you get the idea.

 

[Drakkith]

Do I see 7-8 galaxies there?

 

[davenn]

a good bunch of little fuzzies :)

 

[Andy Resnick]

There's 12 easily visible galaxies in the image above. The faint lines are due to a passing airplane- 1 frame still has statistical significance! I've so far obtained 3 different fields of view, I think I need about 8-10 to really cover the region. This being cleveland, 8-10 clear nights over a 2 month period is not a sure bet... stay tuned!

 

[davenn]

Yup. that's pretty cool

I can pick out an easy 15 fuzzies :)

That's one group I have yet to image

 

[Chronos]

I only see like 12

 

[Andy Resnick]

Here's a first cut of the whole field of view, from 8 separate stacks fused together using Hugin:

There's 9 or 10 Messier objects and at least 100 NGC objects present in this image. I'm still stacking some of the subframes and could acquire a few additional stacks around the periphery, but I'm not sure I'll have a chance before Virgo moves out of position... It's also about 10k x 12k pixels. I'll post the full image to my blog when it's done.

Next up... the globular cluster in Hercules...

 

[Andy Resnick]

Here's the more-or-less final assembly, tweaked for viewing at highly reduced magnification:

For reference, near the bottom-center is the 'siamese twins' pair of galaxies and near the top-center is M88.

 

[Drakkith]

There appears to be a few galaxies there!