Another spell of clear weather in the UK (what is going on
) and I have gathered 12 hours of data on The Eyes galaxy area of Makarian's Chain in the Virgo Cluster. Not as much data as I would have liked and I lost a few hours to thin cloud cover and poor subs though forecast as clear (I hadn't set my Spring Cloudwatcher limits from their winter mode and the unguided mount kept happily tracking; rain would have triggered the unsafe alert though). The forecast and rising moon will not preclude gathering more data this year and other projects beckon.
I have chosen to concentrate the framing to emphasis The Eyes and the wonderful blue arms and dust belt of NGC 4435 and 4438. Using our Spanish wide field rig, Steve and I have a glorious four panel mosaic of the cluster "The Ball and Chain" with almost 60 hours of integration (
here).
From Wikipedia: "Markarian's Chain is a stretch of
galaxies that forms part of the
Virgo Cluster. When viewed from Earth, the galaxies lie along a smoothly curved line.
Charles Messier first discovered two of the galaxies,
M84 and
M86, in 1781. The other galaxies seen in the chain were discovered by
William Herschel[1] and are now known primarily by their catalog numbers in
John Louis Emil Dreyer's
New General Catalogue, published in 1888.
[2] It was ultimately named after the
Armenianastrophysicist,
Benjamin Markarian, who discovered their common motion in the early 1960s.
[3] Member galaxies include
M84 (
NGC 4374),
M86 (
NGC 4406),
NGC 4477,
NGC 4473,
NGC 4461,
NGC 4458,
NGC 4438 and
NGC 4435. It is located at RA 12h 27m and Dec +13° 10′.The bright members of the chain are visible through
small telescopes.
Larger telescopes can be used to view the fainter galaxies .
[2] Near the center there appear the pair of interacting galaxies NGC 4438 and NGC 4435, about 50 million light-years away, known to some as
Markarian's Eyes.At least seven galaxies in the chain appear to move coherently, although others appear to be superposed by chance.
[4] Six of the points on the chain can be marked by galaxies. The other two points are pairs of galaxies."
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