Messier 87 (also known as NGC 4486) is a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo. One of the most massive galaxies in the local universe, it has a large population of globular clusters—about 12,000 compared with the 150–200 orbiting the Milky Way—and a jet of energetic plasma that originates at the core and extends at least 4,900 light-years, traveling at a relativistic speed. It is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky and a popular target for both amateur and professional astronomers.
The French astronomer Charles Messier discovered M87 in 1781, and cataloged it as a nebula. It is located about 53 million light-years from Earth, and unlike a disk-shaped spiral galaxy, M87 has no distinctive dust lanes. Instead, it has an almost featureless, ellipsoidal shape typical of most giant elliptical galaxies, diminishing in luminosity with distance from the center. M87's stars have a nearly spherically symmetric distribution. Their population density decreases with increasing distance from the core. Its galactic envelope extends to a radius of about 490,000 light-years, where it is truncated—possibly by an encounter with another galaxy.
It has an active supermassive black hole at its core, which forms the primary component of an active galactic nucleus. The black hole was imaged using data collected in 2017 by the Event Horizon Telescope, with a final, processed image released on 10 April 2019.
[Source: Wikipedia]
There is an extensive write up on Wikipedia, too long to put here. If you are interested in more info, go to this website:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87CAPTURE Information:
The image was captured with the iOptron CEM120 mount , the venerable Meade 12"LX200 SCT, and my Atik 383L+ mono CCD at F7.16 (2182mm FL). Image subs were taken through Astronomik's filters Lum, R, G and B. All subs were done at 1x1 bin, -10C, at 10 minutes each.
IMAGE information -- 2020
Lum (600s): 39 subs (6.5hr) on Apr 19th, 20th and 22nd.
Lum (30s): 35 subs (0.30hr) on Apr 23rd.
Red: 26 subs (4.33hr) on Apr 16th, 23rd and 24th.
Green: 26 subs (4.33hr) on Apr 19th, 22nd, 23rd and 24th.
Blue: 26 subs (4.33hr) on Apr 22nd, 23rd and 24th.
Processing was done with PixInsight, following (for the most part) kayronjm's tutorial of Feb. 24th from several years back. Only L was used to develop the Luminance image. R, G and B were collected for the color mix. North is to the right (pretty sure), and this is a slight crop due to the various movement of different subs.
COMMENTS:
An additional 35 Lum subs at 30s each was added to the mix to try to capture more info surrounding the jet. Not sure if it did any good.
In the first of the two "thumbnails" I included the inset of the center galaxy with jet in the upper right corner. The intent was to show more clearly the jet emanating from the core towards the slightly lower left.
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