Markarian’s Chain

I returned to another one of my earlier projects this week and took another try at processing. I’ve learned a lot since I started a year ago, and I’ve made the jump to PixInsight. This is Markarian’s Chain, a series of galaxies in the constellation Virgo that lie along a curved line. The galaxies are believed to be a mixture of interacting galaxies and galaxies that are merely apparently aligned due to our perspective.

This area has always fascinated me because it is a good illustration of how unbelievably large space is. This small slice of sky contains a couple dozen easily visible galaxies, each containing a trillion stars….give or take.

And then I decided to use the Annotate Image script in Pixinsight to further explore. The above image is annotated only with the NGC (New_General_cataloged), a catalog of galaxies assembled in the late 1800’s listing about 7800 galaxies. For reference, each grid square is approximately 1 degree square. Quite a few more galaxies….but wait…there’s more.

This image is annotated with the PGC (Principal_Galaxies_Catalogue) that was assembled in 1989 and contains over 73,000 galaxies. A large number of the identified galaxies are only a few pixels and are barely poking out of the noise…but absolutely mind blowing how many are there.

Finally, just for some fun and personal inspiration, I compared the current image to the one I generated with the same data back in April…clear progress!