Markarian's Chain - An Expanse Full of Galaxies

Self-isolating has had its advantages. It's given us time to work on fun things. I've spent a lot more time than usual on my genealogy projects. And, together, we've spent many hours learning and improving our astrophotography skills.

Before we got into this avocation, I envisioned a quick trip to the backyard; snap a couple "star pictures"; come inside to download the pictures; a little editing in Photoshop; and BINGO, we'd have a couple of beautiful, framable-quality photos for our wall.

Thant's NOT how it works.

Setting up the telescope, aligning the mount, focusing (rough and fine), polar-aligning, locating the object in the sky, finding a guide star; initiating guiding; and taking a test picture - all of this before the actual photography takes place - is about an hour-long process.

Then it's time to take the picture. No. Not THE picture. To get a good set of data to work with, we have been taking about 30 three-minute images of the same object in the sky, which totals at least another 90 minutes.

Then the fun starts. The 30 photos of your subject (called your "lights"), have to be processed, which includes "stacking" these pictures with an equal number of "darks," "biases," and (sometimes) "flats," in order to create one image with reduced noise. After this comes a process called "stretching," which involves using the levels and curves tools in your photo editor.

So, if you got bored reading all of that, I'll do the math for you. To get one finished image takes about 3-1/2 hours ... if you are lucky! Since you can't begin photographing until it is dark, that means it is usually midnight before we come inside. The logical thing, at that point, would be to call it a day and climb in bed, but that's not what's been happening. We - well, Dan especially - is usually so pumped about seeing the results that he stays up later, working on the processing.

Most of our efforts, so far, have resulted in less-than-acceptable images. BUT, last night, we took our 30 shots of Markarian's Chain. It is an expanse of galaxies that lie in the Virgo Cluster. Here is a link to a map of this same region of space, with the multitude of galaxies circled. Dan centered the photo on two galaxies, known as "The Eyes." You can see The Eyes in the very center of the image below, one-above-the-other, rather than side-by-side. This is our first really successful astroi-mage, and success is oh-so-SWEET! (Be sure to click on the images to see them a bit larger.)



Here are a couple crops of some of the galaxies, so you can see them larger.