Loadsa Galaxies! (part 1)

It’s been a while since I’ve done any Astro shooting. Not many clear skies, then bright moonlight and freezing cold when it has been clear, and most of the evening targets (Orion, Andromeda etc) dip below the horizon pretty quickly.

But last night was cloudless, mild, moonless. I’d been planning to try shooting Markarian’s Chain, which currently passes high in the Southern sky – ideal from my home location.

This is an area of the sky that is full of galaxies – many are tens of millions of light years away, contain billions of stars each, yet appear as just tiny little blurs in photos.

As usual, shooting something for the first time, which is pretty well invisible with the naked eye, is a real challenge; even with Astro-map apps on my phone and my Goto mount, targeting in was not easy.

The first image missed the ‘chain’ itself, but is the better pic of the two – it was slightly above and to the right of Markarian’s Chain, but still picked up on a number of galaxies. In the middle is M100 – it’s a spiral galaxy about 55million light years away and contains an estimated 400billion stars!

So after determining what I had been shooting for the first part of the night (using Plate Solving website Astrometry), I re-positioned things to capture the ‘Chain’ itself.

The second batch of images did indeed capture the intended target, but actually weren’t as good – partly because I’d inadvertently moved the focal length of my 70-200mm lens to 70mm! Still, I’m very pleased with the first attempts. Whilst nowhere near as dramatic as photos of the Orion Nebula and Andromeda Galaxy, the fact they are so faint and distant, yet contain billions upon billions of stars, planets; maybe even life, makes them very satisfying.

I can feel another attempt coming on when conditions are good. This time, doing some test shots and plate solving to help locate the target better.