Virgo Supercluster (Galaxies)

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Virgo Supercluster (Galaxies)

[Public Domain] 11 May 2015 Dylan O'Donnell
CATEGORY : Astrophotography
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Lately I’ve been posting pretty “showy”, visually compelling nebulas. This image is not perhaps as visually impressive as it is conceptually mind blowing.

Using long exposures in the constellation of Virgo, a whole local group of distant galaxies is revealed. Normally in starry photos you see nice distinct pinpoint stars. But if you look closely at the full resolution version of this image, you’ll see galaxy, after galaxy, after galaxy. I counted 45+ little “fuzzies” in there.. including spirals, and spiral bar galaxies and ones seen from the side. M87 is the brightest and “The Eyes”, a pair of galaxies slowing ripping each other apart in a cosmic gravitational dance. Also check out M88 in the top left corner.

I ran the image through nova.astrometry.net (an online astronomy identification tool) and it annotated and named many of the galaxies in the image. I’ve included it here also out of interest.

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