This is my first try at capturing Markarian’s chain in Virgo. This is a stretch of galaxies that are part of the Virgo cluster. I have seen images of this part of the sky and marveled at the rich field of galaxies. Finally, I was able to get the same view with my own equipment. This is only 1 hour of total exposure and it blows my mind. So many galaxies in one view - billions of stars.

The full frame of the cropped photo above, shows many more galaxies from edge-to-edge of the picture. I could mark about 50 galaxies but there are many more in this field of view. The whole cluster is about 50-70 million light years away.

There are some galaxies here that have some interesting facts and features. Those are annotated in this image with the description below.

M86, an elliptical galaxy has a large blue shift indicating that it is moving towards us at 280km/s. Actually it is getting pulled towards the core of Virgo cluster but relatively towards us.
M87 aka Virgo A is a giant elliptical galaxy which is one of the strongest known radio source. It is larger than our home galaxy, Milky Way and contains about 12000 star clusters which is a lot more compared to ~150-200 in Milky Way. It also has a supermassive black hole at the center that amounts to 2-3 billion solar masses.
M88 is a spiral galaxy. It looks like miniature Andromeda galaxy due to its orientation. It is moving away from us at 2000 km/s.
M84 is also an elliptical galaxy that is one of the brightest in the Virgo cluster. Three supernovae have been observed in this galaxy in 1957, 1980, and 1991. This is unusual for an elliptical galaxy.
The Eyes galaxies appear at about 100,000 light years from each other but they were probably as close as 16,000 light years and it appears that the galaxy on the right has stripped some material from the galaxy on the left.

I have been frustrated with all the cloudy skies over the last couple of months and not getting enough dark sky time. That has made me an impatient observer. I have to get out of this impatient phase where I jump from target to target & spend more time on one target to get better images.