The region around Markarian's chain is a gorgeous piece of night sky. With this image, I attempted to look beyond the obvious and found three interesting features:
- The relativistic jet shot away by M87's supermassive black hole, the first black hole ever imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope initiative.
- Two faint galaxies at >300 million light years, much further away than the galaxies in the Virgo cluster, whose centre is located around 54 million light years from us.
The relativistic jet was obtained from the same raw data but required far less image stretching to allow to resolve details near the galaxy core.
The faint galaxies were removed by Starnet++ v2.0 (being erroneously considered as stars), and had to be manually reintroduced into the starless image.
Raw data acquired from the Telescope Live initiative (CHI-6-CCD telescope, El Sauce observatory, Chile):
- L (4 x 600s)
- R (4 x 600s)
- G (4 x 600s)
- B (4 x 600 s)
Total exposure time: 2h40min
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