Markarian's Chain taken from my Creedmoor site 04/05/2018 is a stretch of galaxies that forms part of the Virgo Cluster. When viewed from Earth, the galaxies lie along a smoothly curved line. Charles Messier first discovered two of the galaxies, M84 and M86, in 1781. The other galaxies seen in the chain were first mentioned in John Louis Emil Dreyer's New General Catalogue, published in 1888. It was ultimately named after the Armenian astrophysicist, Benjamin Markarian, who discovered their common motion in the early 1960s.