What with ever-changing weather, family and job committments I have frequently become a suburban galaxy observer of late. Not content with the usual suspects, like M49, M94 and M81/82, last night (April 17, 2001) I decided to see how much of Markarian's chain I could see from my front yard in Palo Alto with my 9.25 inch SCT.
I had previously traced the whole chain, and some other galaxy chains in Coma, from my yard with a 14.5 inch Dob borrowed from the SJAA on March 31, an exceptional night. Last night looked good as well, perhaps because Barry Bonds had swept the area clean of crud and Dodgers fans with his majestic 500th home run a. little earlier in the evening. Anyway, I was surprised and thrilled to be able to follow the chain without too much difficulty from my yard with the 9.25 inch scope. Specifically I started at M84/86 and was able to see a very dim smudge around where NGC 4435/4438 are, clearly saw NGC 4458/61, 4473, 4477 and 4459 exactly where expected and went on to M88. There are some others in the chain, but I used these because had seen them in the Dob two weeks ago and I didn't want to get lost. Once I started at M84 the rest of the chain was done solely by looking through a 32 mm Sirius eyepiece and starhopping with SkyAtlas 2000.0 (deluxe paper version with folds and creases but no stray pencil marks)-- my 50 mm finder wouldn't have beeen much help in this region anyway.
Has anyone else done this from the 'burbs with a single digit aperture SCT? I saw the Fornax galaxy cluster a while ago from my yard, but this was even more exciting. I estimate limiting visual magnitude was about 4.3 or slightly better.