Messier Object 61 - A spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo, one of the larger members of the 1500-member Virgo galaxy cluster. Imaged over 1 hour from outer Melbourne 2/2/2019. In this relatively short exposure (30 minutes of Luminescence data and 10 minutes each with Red, Green and Blue filters) a total of 8 galaxies can be made out, with the 3 furthest and faintest galaxies (NGC 4292a, PGC 5092639 and PGC 1270369) circled in red being a billion light years away. There are also other suspect ultra-faint responses which would need several hours of deeper exposure to confirm if they are additional galaxies.

I think this is the furthest back in time - to date - that I have knowingly peered with the 8 inch Newtonian. The light from the 3 furthest galaxies in the field of view has travelled for a billion years before finally bouncing off 2 mirrors in the telescope and ending their journey in a silicon pixel well on the CMOS camera sensor. Those photons departed their galaxies around the time that life on earth was still only single-cellular.

At some point (when I have darker skies away from Melbourne) I intend to image some particularly dense galaxy clusters and try to go real deep with at least 6 hours of exposure, inspired by the Hubble Deep Field image (in Ursa Major) and the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) image (in Fornax). In those famous Hubble views, the Hubble space telescope was pointed at two of the known most dark, and featureless points of space, with extra long exposures to see what - if anything- was there, and to peer back to the earliest stages of galaxy formation in the early universe. In the case of the HUDF image, the Hubble space telescope was pointed for a total of 11.3 days (to collect 800 images over 400 orbits) to expose the sensors to an area of sky equivalent to holding a 1x1mm piece of paper at arms length (covering just 1/26 millionth of the area of the sky). The processed images became known as the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, and astounded astronomers when it revealed on the order of 10,000 galaxies peppered across that single processed image. But that was Hubble. So I am more than happy with seeing just 8 galaxies in the one field of view - for now.