Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Virgo (Vir)  ·  Contains:  IC 3303  ·  IC 3311  ·  IC 3349  ·  IC 3355  ·  IC 3363  ·  IC 3388  ·  IC 3393  ·  IC 3443  ·  M 84  ·  M 86  ·  M 87  ·  NGC 4374  ·  NGC 4387  ·  NGC 4388  ·  NGC 4402  ·  NGC 4406  ·  NGC 4407  ·  NGC 4413  ·  NGC 4425  ·  NGC 4431  ·  NGC 4435  ·  NGC 4436  ·  NGC 4438  ·  NGC 4440  ·  NGC 4458  ·  NGC 4461  ·  NGC 4473  ·  NGC 4476  ·  NGC 4478  ·  NGC 4486  ·  And 2 more.
M87 (for topical value!), M86, M84 and Markarian's chain, Pam Whitfield
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M87 (for topical value!), M86, M84 and Markarian's chain

M87 (for topical value!), M86, M84 and Markarian's chain, Pam Whitfield
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M87 (for topical value!), M86, M84 and Markarian's chain

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Description

Topical but not great image of M87 together with M86, M84 and part of Markarian's chain. My Southern sky isn't wonderful sky light-pollution-wise (not helped by a mercury street-light very closeby, pity it isn't one of the old sodium ones...) and with the moon up it was never going to be wonderful in broadband but seemed a pity to waste a clear night - especially as the nights are rapidly shortening. It's a bit short of the green channel due to said light pollution even with the IDAS filter.

The flats are way too short in my broadband images with the mechanical shutter of the QHY9 so one of my summer tasks is to tackle this. First stop is some heavy duty neutral density gel film to attenuate the light from the flat-field generator, hopefully enough to allow me to also improve the uniformity by increasing the generator brightness a bit.

Another job is to try and further reduce the reflection issues from the filters, etc in the longer narrowband exposures. Gives me something to do over the long summer evenings until nebulae season returns....

This LRGB image is a touch under 3 hours of the least bad frames - most of the decent ones seemed to have a plane or satellite trail before reflections from the street-light totally washed out the frames so I couldn;t afford to exclude them all. The heavy-handed gradient removal will also have removed some of the detail but needs must... Not sure the data is good enough to justify reprocessing to get what will only be incremental improvements in what will always be a pretty noisy image.

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Revisions

  • M87 (for topical value!), M86, M84 and Markarian's chain, Pam Whitfield
    Original
  • Final
    M87 (for topical value!), M86, M84 and Markarian's chain, Pam Whitfield
    B

B

Description: restacked with drizzling and reprocessed from scratch. Getting rid of all the satellite trails in the better quality subs (sods law) was a real pain but they don't seem too obvious while not clipping the background.

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M87 (for topical value!), M86, M84 and Markarian's chain, Pam Whitfield