A City of Galaxies

About 54 million light-years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Virgo, lies the nearest large galaxy cluster to our own, a gravitationally bound swarm of over a thousand galaxies, all orbiting a common center of mass. This is the Virgo Cluster, and its core is one of the densest concentrations of galaxies visible from Earth.

This image covers roughly 8° × 5° of sky, an area about the size of your fist held at arm's length centered on the heart of that cluster. Within this single field, there are twelve galaxies from Charles Messier's famous catalog, over 150 additional cataloged galaxies, and about 63,000 individual stars from our own Milky Way scattered across the foreground.Every smudge and faint oval in this image is an entire galaxy a collection of billions of stars, so distant that even through a telescope with nearly 58 hours of combined exposure, most of them appear as nothing more than a soft glow.

What is Markarian's Chain?

In the 1970s, the Armenian astronomer Benjamin Markarian noticed that a string of galaxies in this region appeared to form a graceful curved arc across the sky. That arc now called Markarian's Chain runs through the center of this image, connecting some of the brightest and most massive galaxies in the cluster.

The chain begins with the pair M84 and M86, two giant elliptical galaxies with smooth, featureless halos of starlight. It continues through a striking pair called "The Eyes" (NGC 4435 and NGC 4438), where one galaxy's disk has been visibly torn apart by the gravitational pull of its neighbor. From there the arc sweeps toward M87, the enormous galaxy that sits at the gravitational center of the entire cluster.

Whether these galaxies are truly connected in a physical chain, moving together through space, or simply happen to line up from our perspective is still a matter of some debate. But the visual alignment is unmistakable, and it makes this one of the most recognizable galaxy fields in the sky.

M87 — The Giant at the Center

The largest galaxy in this image is M87, a supergiant elliptical galaxy that anchors the entire Virgo Cluster. It contains several trillion stars roughly ten times more than our Milky Way and its faint outer halo of stripped starlight extends nearly a million light-years from its center.

M87 became world-famous in 2019 when the Event Horizon Telescope produced the first-ever direct image of a black hole the supermassive black hole at M87's core, with a mass of about 6.5 billion suns. That black hole powers a jet of material shooting outward at nearly the speed of light, visible in professional telescopes as a thin spike extending from the galaxy's nucleus.

In this image, M87 appears as the largest smooth glow in the field a vast halo of ancient stars accumulated over billions of years of galactic mergers and collisions.

Twelve Messiers in One Frame

One of the things that makes this region remarkable is the sheer number of well-known objects packed into a single patch of sky. Twelve of the galaxies here appear in the Messier catalog a list of 110 deep-sky objects compiled in the 18th century by the French astronomer Charles Messier, originally as a reference of things that might be confused with comets.

Those twelve galaxies span a wide range of types. There are smooth, round elliptical galaxies like M84, M86, and M89, ancient systems where star formation ceased long ago, leaving behind a uniform glow of old red and yellow stars. There are grand spiral galaxies like M99 and M100, with sweeping blue arms where new stars are still being born. And there are everything in between barred spirals, lenticular galaxies, and edge-on disks sliced by dark lanes of interstellar dust.

The companion grid image shows all twelve at the same scale, cropped directly from the mosaic. Because the crops are all at the same magnification, the size differences you see are real M87's halo really does dwarf M89, and M100's spiral arms really do span a wider angle on the sky than M58's.

Galaxies Colliding in Slow Motion

Some of the most visually striking objects in this field aren't in the Messier catalog at all. They're pairs of galaxies caught in the act of interacting drawn together by gravity over hundreds of millions of years.

• The Eyes (NGC 4435 and NGC 4438) are a pair where the larger galaxy's disk has been violently distorted. Streams of gas and stars have been pulled outward into long tidal tails, and the disrupted regions glow blue with newly formed stars ignited by the compression of gas during the encounter.
• The Siamese Twins (NGC 4567 and NGC 4568) are two spiral galaxies whose disks are just beginning to overlap. Each still retains its own spiral arm structure, but the contact region between them has begun to blur. Hundreds of millions of years from now, they'll merge into a single larger galaxy.

These interactions are a normal part of galaxy evolution. Our own Milky Way is expected to collide with the nearby Andromeda Galaxy in about four and a half billion years an event that will look, to some distant observer with a very large telescope, much like what we're seeing here.

My First Mosaic

This is the most ambitious imaging project I've undertaken. The field is far too wide to capture in a single frame with my telescope, so I divided it into six overlapping panels a 2×3 grid and imaged each one separately over the course of 21 nights between February and March 2026.

The data was collected remotely from Starfront Observatory in Texas. The camera captures light one color channel at a time separate exposures through luminance, red, green, and blue filters and the color image is assembled afterward in software, much like how a color printer combines separate ink layers.

Stitching six panels into a seamless mosaic turned out to be the hardest part. Each panel was captured under slightly different sky conditions across different nights, so the brightness and color gradients didn't match at the borders. After several failed attempts, I found specialized software that uses the measured brightness of stars in the overlap regions to mathematically scale each panel to match its neighbors. The stitching process alone took two days of iteration.

The final image represents nearly 58 hours of total exposure time across 767 individual frames all combined and processed to reveal detail that no single photograph could capture.

Looking Deeper

What strikes me most about this image is the density. Most deep-sky photographs feature one or two objects set against a dark background. Here, the galaxies aren't specimens — they're the environment. Every direction you look, there's another galaxy, and another one beyond that, stretching back through layers of distance and cosmic time. The Virgo Cluster is the closest place where you can truly see galaxies as a population rather than as isolated curiosities.

Some of the light in this image left its source galaxy 50 or 60 million years ago around the time the asteroid that ended the age of the dinosaurs struck Earth. It traveled across an almost incomprehensible emptiness, only to land on a camera sensor in a field in West Texas, one photon at a time, while I watched remotely from a thousand miles away.

If you take the time to explore the full-resolution image, galaxies appear everywhere dozens of tiny edge-on disks, faint face-on spirals, and compact ellipticals that only reveal their shapes when you zoom in. Faint wisps of galactic cirrus dust in our own Milky Way, illuminated by the combined starlight of our galaxy thread through portions of the field, adding an unexpected layer of foreground texture to what is otherwise an extragalactic scene.

That never stops being remarkable.