Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Coma Berenices (Com)  ·  Contains:  IC 3478  ·  M 88  ·  NGC 4501
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M88 #1, Molly Wakeling
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M88 #1

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M88 #1, Molly Wakeling
Powered byPixInsight

M88 #1

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Description

Galaxy M88!

#88 on Charles Messier's list of "things that aren't comets," M88 is a spiral galaxy 50-60 million lightyears behind the constellation Coma Berenices. It belongs to the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, which is home to some 1,500 galaxies. The supermassive black hole at its center is 80 million times the mass of the Sun, or about 20x the mass of our own galaxy's black hole.

This image was tough to process -- I didn't get a whole lot of data on it, and some of it was from before I started taking better flat frames. The colors came out weird, so I had to tweak them quite a bit to get something that looked vaguely galaxy-like! But it's really not too shabby a result from my light-polluted area.

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M88 #1, Molly Wakeling