The Makarian Chain

Galaxies often fall into groups. Our own Milky Way & Andromeda are the 2 largest member galaxies of our local group. But groups of galaxies are often collected within a Supercluster. Our local Supercluster, of which our group is an outlying member, is dominated by the galaxies of the Virgo Cluster. The Virgo cluster contains a possible 2000 galaxies lying almost 60 million light years away from Earth. The Messier catalogue includes several of these galaxies, M86 & M84 are seen here as the two most visually significant galaxies.

Image Data:
Focal Length 700mm
Focal Ratio f5.6
Exposure 2 hrs 24 mins

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