Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Virgo (Vir)  ·  Contains:  M 87  ·  NGC 4486  ·  Virgo Galaxy
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M87 with Jet, Ryan Carroll
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M87 with Jet

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M87 with Jet, Ryan Carroll
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M87 with Jet

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M87 and its Jet taken from my back yard with my C11. This is heavily cropped to better show the jet. I am ecstatic with how much detail I was able to pull off for an armature astrophotographer. 

This jet appears to be about 18,000 light years long. M87 itself is estimated at 132,000 light years in diameter.  It lies a humbling 54 Million Light years away from Earth in the constellation Virgo. 

Some truly impressive facts from Nasa:
The elliptical galaxy M87 is the home of several trillion stars, a supermassive black hole and a family of roughly 15,000 globular star clusters. For comparison, our Milky Way galaxy contains only a few hundred billion stars and about 150 globular clusters. The monstrous M87 is the dominant member of the neighboring Virgo cluster of galaxies, which contains some 2,000 galaxies. Discovered in 1781 by Charles Messier, this galaxy is located 54 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Virgo. It has an apparent magnitude of 9.6 and can be observed using a small telescope most easily in May.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/explore-the-night-sky/hubble-messier-catalog/messier-87/

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M87 with Jet, Ryan Carroll