Markarian’s Chain is a chain of galaxies in the Virgo cluster of galaxies. The chain consists of eight main galaxies and ten smaller ones. 

This image was made with a Nikon Z7II and a Nikon 400mm f/4.5 lens. A total of 44 30-second images were taken at ISO 3200 for a total exposure time of 22 minutes. Star tracking was done with a Fornax LighTack II. The raw images were converted to TIF using RawTherapee, which were then aligned using Deep Sky Stacker. The star aligned images were then stacked using sigma clipped averaging on program astro-sca. The stacked image was then stretched and color corrected using astro-color-stretch. Both astro-sca and astro-color-stretch are Python programs and are available here in the astrophotography software downloads page.