20220225 - Markarian’s Chain - A string of galaxy-pearls in the night

What’s in the picture(s) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markarian%27s_Chain
Quote: “Markarian's Chain is a stretch of galaxies that forms part of the Virgo Cluster. When viewed from Earth, the galaxies lie along a smoothly curved line. Charles Messier first discovered two of the galaxies, M84 and M86, in 1781”

What was the experience
Last week, following palindroom-day, there was a run of clear nights, no (full-)moon-light and only the dreaded street lights to contend with. The scopes were out, whirring away nurturing photons, and I was losing a lot of sleep …

The first half of the nights, the TS94 was catching some of the ‘last’ nebulae, before plunging into Galaxy-season. Galaxies are a bit too small for the wide-field TS94, but when you have a string of pearls of them together, it’s worthwhile to catch that necklace. This also meant that halfway through the nights, I had to manually switch the filter from the L-enhance  (for the nebulae) to the L-Pro (galaxies). I think an electronic filter wheel might also be handy with an OSC camera.

The image is a combination with data from 3 nights, but stupidly enough, I cleaned some dust specks from the filters after the first night, but had processed the subs with the same flats. Hidden in de background, not visible to the naked eye, are 2 dust-bowls, but overall the image looks fine, with a little bit of detail in the galaxies (thanks to the lengthy integration time)

Some quite interesting galaxies in the picture: M84-M86, and also a myriad of galaxies fro; the Virgo cluster in the background. But more importantly: NGC4435-4438, also known as ARP 120, a set of galaxies I’m starting to grow fond of.

How it was doneScope: TS94 APO (FL 414mm)
Mount: EQ6-R Pro
Camera: ASI2600MC Pro
Filter: L-Pro
Photons: 20220222-24-25 180s 107x
Processing: PixInsight (Mac)

What have I learned from this
I always thought that an EFW for a colour-camera would not be necessary, but having spend 3 nights planning the exact time-spot halfway through the night to manually switch a filter, that definitely changed my opinion about that.
I’m happy I’m going for the longer integration times, although some more integration time could’ve been helpful to get more detail in the small Galaxy-specks

Clear Skies everybody! 🤩✨🔭

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