This is a portion of Markarian's Chain - the portion I could fit in my 430mm focal length F/4.9 telescope FOV. While most of my images are focused on the beauty of a single target - galaxy, nebula, planet - this image is an ode to the incredible expanse of our universe. This image in a sliver of the sky - about 3 moons wide to the naked eye - holds over 18 galaxies. If I were to stretch the image to see every little fuzzball, the count would go up (but to the detriment of an image that's pleasing to the eye).There are several elliptical and lenticular galaxies in the cluster, and the light collected from these galaxies in my telescope is about 50,000,000 years old, plus or minus ~10M years. Markarian's Chain is in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies - several of these galaxies are moving together (a gang of heavenly bodies traversing the universe together) - some notables include M84 and M86. To think that each of the galaxies in these images has billions of star systems, and each star system has a probability of having planetary systems.....images like these just blow my mind by showing the expanse of the universe, all from a backyard.

This image was taken in Prescott, AZ under excellent "seeing" (low atmospheric turbulence) and Bortle 3-4 light pollution conditions. It consists of 128 images, with 3 min exposure each, for total of ~6.5 hrs of exposure, and the typical 30/30/30 dark, flat, and dark-flat calibration files.