I knew that M87 contains a massive black hole that is ejecting plasma at its poles, and I wanted to see if somehow I captured it in my Markarian’s Chain data. I am happy to say that I sure did!
M87 is a massive elliptical class galaxy with a very large black hole at its center. The black hole contains the equivalent of 20 million solar masses and the jets extend outwards of 50,000 light years. It is also a very bright radio source called Virgo A.
I wanted to confirm that this is what I captured so I looked online at other examples. One of which was taken by the ESO’s Very Large Telescope. As you can see, the direction of the jet aligns with the picture.
I was very excited that I was able to capture this. This of course is not new as many amateur astroimagers have taken this with their setup, but it was still exciting to me nonetheless.