Luminance: 27 x 180sec
R: 79 x 60 sec
G: 87 x 60 sec
B: 75 x 60 sec

Stacked and processed in Pixinsight.

Markarian's Chain in Virgo.
The luminance data was captured from the North Houston Astronomy Club dark site location in Dobbin, TX on March 25th. On this night we had a large group of members show up with their scopes for 2023's Messier marathon. This was my first experience at attempting to observe all messier objects in one night. And I had a blast! The first few hours was a furious race against the spin of our world to locate and log all the objects that were low on the western horizon. After this things settled down and you could slow down, relax, and really enjoy bouncing around to other people's scopes and take in all the beautiful wonders of our universe. The Virgo constellation holds many Messier galaxies that collectively make up what is called Markarian's chain. If you are in a dark sky location and have enough aperture you will not stop finding galaxies. They are everywhere! The hardest part for me was figuring out which galaxy was which as there are so many! Around 3:30am high clouds rolled in and the 4 of us that were left on the field had to call it a night. I was able to visually log 73 objects out of the 110. One member had a night vision set up and was able to log around 85 objects. It was one of those nights I will never forget.

RGB filters for the image was taken from my backyard in Kingwood, TX.

Markarian's Chain has long been a target that I have wished to captured. One day I would love to use a longer focal length system and redo this field with a high resolution mosaic image.