Loadsa Galaxies! (part 2)

A couple of nights after the last ‘galaxies’ session, there was another clear night (although not quite as clear as before).

By far the furthest objects I’ve attempted, these galaxies in the constellation Virgo are at least 50million light years away – and it’s these numbers that are mind-blowing:

One light year is around 6 TRILLION MILES (6,000,000,000,000), so these galaxies are 50m x 6tr miles away!

For a bit more context, The Sun is just
8 LIGHT MINUTES away (96million miles) and Mars is an average of 140million miles (12 light minutes)

Again, this image of Markarian’s Chain is not fantastically dramatic, but the fact that I’ve captured objects so distant makes up for the lack of colour and detail.

Markarian’s Chain, a line of about eight main galaxies, but with many more distant ones in the frame too. Each of these galaxies contain billions of stars and planets.

For general interest, here’s a Plate Solve of the final image – the green circles (or most anyway) are galaxies – some of the tiny ones are even further away, 90mly, maybe more – I haven’t checked them all!

So I set up quite early, as soon as the first couple of stars appeared, spent plenty of time getting the tracker aligned properly, then set focus by locking on to Venus.

I then spent a bit of time checking accuracy of the mount by using the Goto function to lock onto various bright targets.

Then the power lead fell out, so I had to start all over again!!

Once all was set up again, it was much darker and I was able to see some of the stars in the general region of Markarian’s Chain. So I entered M86 into the handset and took a couple of test shots. Removed the SD card, came indoors and Plate Solved with Astrometry and I was quickly able to see that I just needed to slew the mount a couple of degrees left to be on target.

I managed then to get 3 hours of 30second exposures and the mount tracked fairly well throughout. Although as the mount is an AZ (not Equatorial) there was some rotation that needed to be cropped out of the final stacked image. I also took about 150 calibration frames.

It’s clear that 200mm is only just enough to capture such distant objects – a 600mm lens or a small telescope would obviously be an improvement. I might just give my litle scope a try one night, although I don’t expect the quality to be good enough.

There were quite a few Starlink satellites in the first dozen or so frames, but they were all successfully removed by the stacking process. Unfortunately this pollution of the dark sky by Mr Musk is becoming more and more common in Astrophotography.

Not sure what the three thick traces are on the first image – could be an aircraft, but you usually see the red and green lights too.

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