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First astrophotography session from my new house - the Virgo Cluster

As I already mentioned in oh so many blog posts, I now live in a house, which opens totally new possibilities when doing astrophography. I no longer have to drive a long way just to get to the spot, and then spend hours either outside in the cold, or in a small shed. Now all I need is to carry out the equipment in the evening, do the setup and polar alignment when it gets acceptably dark, and then sit comfortably on the couch and control the session from the inside. Which means I can do much longer sessions without freezing and getting fed up with it all.

The house is quite far from the cities, so the sky is around Bortle 4/5, which is not bad for the more populated parts of Poland. Using binoculars I can see the Andromeda Galaxy, Alpha Persei Cluster, Messier 44 and the like. Messier 42 is plainly visible with the naked eye. Much, much better than living in Poznań.

I've been planning to do a separate blog post about the AP gear and software I am using, and yes, it will come at some point, but not today :)

This is a new start for me after some hiatus, so I am keeping it simple, wide angle, simple setups and no guiding. Guiding has been an endless source of problems and frustrations for me, so for now I am skipping it to focus on the other parts of astrophotography, and just find fun in it.

The Virgo Cluster

Spring is around us, which means that in the Northern Hemisphere it's duck rabbit galaxy season. The Milky Way is low on the horizon, and most of the sky is away from the plane of our Galaxy, which gives a clear view on the more interesting galaxies other than our own.

I am using a 150mm lens to do AP now, so of course it's much too wide for a single galaxy (maybe apart from Andromeda, but she hugs the horizon), so I went with a galaxy cluster. The Virgo Cluster is in the perfect place to shoot it, high in the Eastern sky between the constellations of Leo, Virgo, and Coma Berenices. It consists of thousands of galaxies, with tens of them visible with amateur equipment. A notable part of the Virgo Cluster is the Markarian's Chain, a group of galaxies that seem to ordered in a smooth line.

With the introduction done, time to present the actual photo that I did:

And here it is, the Virgo Cluster. Right off the bat, several large galaxies can be visible, but when you zoom in (click on the image for the full resolution), much more smaller ones can be seen.

Here's a walkthrough of the more notable ones.

M88

Messier 88 on Wikipedia

M90

Messier 90 on Wikipedia

M99

Messier 99 on Wikipedia

M100

Messier 100 on Wikipedia

Markarian's Chain

Markarian's Chain on Wikipedia

Annotated images

And here is the image annotated, and it's position in the night sky.

Technicalities

As I said above, I am keeping it simple for now, to extract most fun and results without getting frustrated by the more complicated parts of AP.

Session:

The gear:

Software:

Editing in Pix:

Finally a sprinkle of Curves, Levels and Saturation in GIMP.

My Pix skills are extremely simple, I need to do more tutorials and reading on it, I'm sure that with the right skills I could pull out more of the data that I have.

Bottom Line

And that's basically it, I feel that I am opening a totally new chapter in my AP journey, and from now on taking new photos will be much easier and I will be much more willing to do so.

Summer is coming quickly and with it the nights too short to do AP, but I am hoping that before that I will be able to capture a bit of Cygnus, I've been planning to do a proper shoot of the Veil for a long time now.

Thanks for reading!

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