My magnum opus for 2024. This is one of those projects where you have to tell yourself you really want it. For a full four months, I dedicated the TOA solely to this target (with a couple of exceptions for targets shot during garbage time before this was visible at the beginning of the night). Then for two more months, I shot bits and pieces whenever I could. 

I've only seen a couple of attempts at capturing the Ha bridge between the Eyes and M86 including this recent IOTD wonderfully captured and rendered by @Nicola Beltraminelli. I don't know how well this effort stands up against them. Even at 137+ hours under a pristine sky, the Ha is still just barely above the noise floor. I had to push continuum subtraction and the black point really hard on the Ha master to be confident that what I was seeing was real signal. I'm pretty sure it is now, and I've done my best to represent what's actually there. And what's there is quite a strong Ha signal swirling about the core of M86. That seems to fan out to a lumpy perimeter around the outskirts of the galaxy and there's quite a bit of dim, diffuse Ha in a large area around the scene of the crime. That intuitively makes sense to me from a physics standpoint, but I've not done any detailed scientific study of it, and I'm not a scientist, so I can't be totally sure. 

I have previously posted three crops from this region, one of M87 showing its black hole jet, another of the Eyes showing some of this Ha, and yet another focused on M86 and the hydrogen inside and around it. Those images were done when I had much less integration time compared to the image posted here. On the Eyes crop, @Loïck VIGER was kind enough to point out a scientific study that seems to conclude that NGC 4438 and M86 collided at some point, which disturbed and heated the gas in and around them to reveal this bridge between them.

There's quite a bit of very faint, dusty stuff in the interstellar medium in this field. I was actually a little surprised at just how faint it turned out to be. I figured 50+ hours of LRGB would be enough to make it very apparent. In the Virgo galaxy cluster, there is thought to be as much as eight times the mass in intergalactic gas and material as in all the galaxies in the cluster. Pretty wild. 

Because the TOA is not really a galaxy killer, my plan for next year is to perhaps gather another 100 hours on this then and see where that goes.

With every image I take, I'm looking for a way to distinguish it from others and show something new, or at least not widely seen. Sometimes that's not possible, or I just miss the mark, but I hope I've accomplished it here.