[dheera]

I don't have a night vision system so haven't tried that on Markarian's chain. What is much easier for naked eye vision is the Andromeda galaxy, which is much closer. It is actually about 6 times the visual size of a full moon in the sky, though with naked eye in a dark enough place you can barely see the fuzzy blob of a core with off-center vision. You can see the core more clearly with binoculars. However it will look small because you are only looking at the core. The magnificant spiral arms are what extend around that core 6 times the size of a moon. You can easily see the spiral structure with a consumer full frame camera. A star tracker will produce a crystal clear image of it, but without a tracker, a short exposure and high ISO can still show its existence. Even a 50mm or 100mm lens is enough to make it out. At 500mm it will fill the whole frame almost corner-to-corner. It's huge.

Keep in mind galaxies are extremely low density on average. So even though Andromeda has about 1 trillion stars, it's still mostly vacuum with lightyears of distance between adjacent stars inside it. So it appears much, much, much dimmer than the individual stars in the sky from our own galaxy.