Markarian's Chain together with M87. Markarian's Chain proper is in the upper left of the image, and M87 is in the lower center. They all can be seen, from Earth, in the constellation Virgo. Captured from my back patio.
Before I begin, let me state that acquisition and processing of this image was a mess. Some troubles were self induced, and some not. This project spanned from February though July of 2023.
There was about 2 months straight of cloudy skies at night. Straight. Every single night. What started as an early morning target ended up as an early evening target with nothing in between. Bounding that were weeks on either end of only a few minutes to a few hours of clear skies. And just to put things in perspective, I ended up with way more flat frames than light frames for this project.
Then, when processing the data, I came to realize that all the R, G, and B subframes were all slightly overexposed yielding saturation artifacts in the brighter stars. Ugggh. What have I done!?! Well, too late to collect more data this year. A redo will have to wait.
Figure 1. A bunch of dumb galaxies.
Below is a slightly cropped area showing just the Markarian's Chain region.
Figure 2. Markarian's Chain.
I think M87 turned out pretty interesting though. If you're not familiar with M87, do you remember a few years ago where the Event Horizon Telescope project released the first direct image of a black hole? That's the supermassive black hole at the center of M87.
It goes without saying that my little 80 mm refractor is not going to resolve the black hole. But surprisingly, it was able to resolve the relativistic jet spewing forth from M87's central, supermassive black hole. See Fig. 3. That jet coming from the center of the galaxy was actually captured with my wimpy little 80mm, backyard scope. The image is from the same data as the above image(s), only heavily cropped and contrast adjusted.
Figure 3. M87.
The M87 jet is often used as an example of "superluminal motion," where if you were to naively calculate the speed of the jet [or particular parts of the jet] using simple, Newtonian physics, it would appear to be moving faster than the speed of light. Of course, it's not. It just naively "looks" that way because
a) it is moving pretty darned fast in the first place, and
b) a significant component of the jet's velocity vector is in our direction. It only ends up being measured as moving slower than light speed once you do your due diligence and take the physics of special relativity into account.
Equipment:
Explore Scientific 80ED-FCD100
Sky-Watcher EQ6-R Pro
Orion Field Flattener for Short Refractors (most data)
Orion 0.8x Focal Reducer for Refractors (some data)
Off-axis guider (OAG) with guide camera
Optolong L-Pro filter
Baader Hα 3.5nm Ultra-Narrowband filter
ZWO LRGB filter set
ZWO ASI2600MM-Pro main camera
On some rare, clear nights, it seemed my telescope sparked the curiosity of nearby passing clouds. They, of course, would call their cloud friends over to check out what all the hubub was about.
Software:
N.I.N.A.
PHD2 guiding
PixInsight with RC-Astro plugins
On one rare, clear night, there was even a helicopter with a searchlight circling overhead for some reason.
Integration:
Location: San Diego
Bortle class 7 (maybe 8 ) skies.
All subframes binned 1x1, stacked with drizzle algorithm
L-Pro: 320×120s = 10.67 hrs
Hα: 56×600s = 9.33 hrs
R: 142×180s = 7.10 hrs
G: 172×180s = 8.60 hrs
B: 183×180s = 9.15 hrs
Total integration time: 44.85 hours.
:
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