Benyamin Markarian unchained.

[ollypenrice]

We all know his chain but who was he? An internet search finds him described as the second greatest Armenian astronomer in history, an astrophysicist particularly interested in galaxies with unusual spectra and with active nucleii.

Here is the famous chain and, though it is ludicrously photogenic from the point of view of framing, an excecise in Glorious Tehnicolor it is not. This was started by guest Andrew Harrison last night and finished off by myself since Andrew had an early start this morning.

LRGB in the Takahashi FSQ85/EM200/Atik 4000 mono setup. 40 mins per channel colour and about 2.5 hours of luminance.

Olly

[Quatermass]

Brilliant Olly its a job to get it all in the frame but its oh so cool.

[Daniel-K]

fantastic ! never heard of this till the other day

[JamesF]

Never mind the colour. It really is rather gorgeous to look at.

James

[Gina]

Galaxies galore!

[Tom OD]

Nice shot. Its more Scorpion than the constellation Scorpius for me. The colour is very tricky. I took 150mins unbinned per channel last year, and I wasn't pleased with it. This year, with only 530mm this is the only galaxy or grouping I can really have a go at. So I'm going to go for a ridiculous amount of RGB on it to see if I can pull anything out of it.

I never even looked up Markarian, good to know something about him.

Tom.

[ollypenrice]

Nice shot. Its more Scorpion than the constellation Scorpius for me. The colour is very tricky. I took 150mins unbinned per channel last year, and I wasn't pleased with it. This year, with only 530mm this is the only galaxy or grouping I can really have a go at. So I'm going to go for a ridiculous amount of RGB on it to see if I can pull anything out of it.

I never even looked up Markarian, good to know something about him.

Tom.

Good idea to have a killer go at this in seaarch of colour. The thing is that the old ellipticals have burned out their hot blue young stars and, of course, there is no star formation so really it's red...or red! There isn't much star colour either, maybe because the field stars are few and far between and may be very distant. Attaboy!

Olly

[martin_h]

Ive imaged this one a few times and never managed to get much colour out of it.