My final image from last week was taken on the 24th April 2026 using my Dwarf 3. I decided to try a much more difficult and faint object and this was the Coma Cluster of galaxies in Coma Berenices. This cluster appears as number 35 in Patrick Moore's Caldwell Catalogue and the galaxies in it are located 300 million light years from us. On the 24th the Moon was at first quarter and it didn't set until 03:43 BST on the 25th, so light from it was making observation more difficult. Added to this, towards midnight a mist arose which terminated my observing. Here is what I obtained after 368x15s (1 hour 32 minutes) of observation:-
The cluster is the faint collection of objects near the centre of the image. The first frame was taken at 22:25 BST and the last at 00:21 on the 25th. The Astro filter was employed and the gain was 60. The image was processed in Stellar Studio using auto settings and binned x2. Here is a more close up version using the unbinned image:-
The cluster is dominated by two supergiant elliptical galaxies, NGC 4889 (left of centre) and NGC 4874 (right of centre). It looks like there is a swarm of stars surrounding these two objects, but these are in fact galaxies (the cluster contains at least 1000 bright ellipticals). Below I have attempted to label some of the brighter galaxies in the full frame image (click to enlarge):-
All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2026
No comments:
Post a Comment