For my last trip to the Rodopa mountain I decided to cross the limits and to target an object that is hard to believe that a non-professional equipment could catch.
I was impressed by the recently announced of direct radio image of M87 black hole. Messier 87 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo, 53 million light-years. The jet is 5000 ly long and is so powerful that is compatitive in Britishness to the whole galaxy. There are a few optical images from Hubble space telescope, Chandra space telescope as well as some amateurs images in Astrobin. Wikipedia article
So I shoot M87 galaxy core and stack the images to come up with the jet from the super massive black hole at the center :O
I had to strip most of the frames as I am looking for perfectly tracked images in order to capture such a fine detail. For me this is the best shot I ever did :)
It is amazing that I got it with such a short integration time. The stack is only from 40 frames of 30s exposure. I recently got a autoguider but could not set it up
for that observations, so I had to keep high ISO 6400. However due to Pentax k5 ISO invariance it is possible to get high resolution with stack of a high ISO.
Shots are taken two consistent nights from locations 70 km apart. One is Vila Meandrite (Kara Tepe) and the other is the National Obseratory - Rozhen.
For that object it is same as to shoot at the same time from those 2 locations.
Shots are taken with 200mm - SW200pds newton telescope. I tested to use x3 magnification but the additional optics spoil the fine details so I preferred to shoot in direct focus and to crop the 16M image. The limitation here is the Earth athmosphere, so the sharper the image is the better.

This is how a good single frame crop looks like

This is the final stacked image:

This is second process attempt with more frames - 55 and better suppression of the galactic core:

I will proceed to target this object as I can get the colors of the jet with more frames and some more details if manage to have autoguiding. It is so amazing that you I can see a direct evidence of a block hole by myself.

Here is how it would looks shown on an artist representation