Abell 1656 / Coma Cluster (Jan Beránek)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Coma Berenices (Com) · Contains: HD112734 · HD112753 · HD112754 · HD112886 · HD112887 · IC 3943 · IC 3946 · IC 3947 · IC 3949 · IC 3955 · IC 3957 · IC 3959 · IC 3960 · IC 3963 · IC 3968 · IC 3973 · IC 3976 · IC 3998 · IC 4012 · IC 4021 · IC 4026 · IC 4030 · IC 4032 · IC 4033 · IC 4040 · IC 4041 · IC 4042 · IC 4044 · IC 4045 · IC 4051 · And 48 more.

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Abell 1656 / Coma Cluster

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Abell 1656 / Coma Cluster

How many galaxies can you count on this photograph?

An online tool (Astrometry.net) identified several dozen, but at a higher resolution, there would be actually over thousand of them! This picture captures so called "Coma Cluster", a small area densely packed with galaxies in the constellation of Coma Berenices (Berenice's hair). This cluster is also catalogued as Abell 1656, and along with another galaxy cluster in the nearby constellation of Leo forms a galactic supercluster - a huge structure made of thousands of galaxies in the space.

The Coma Cluster is about 300 million light years away from our Earth, which is why individual galaxies appear quite small. The three most prominent ones on the photo are two giant elliptical galaxies NGC 4874 and NGC 4889 (they appear as fuzzy clouds in the shape of an ellipse) in the center of the photo, and a beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 4921 (appearing halfway from center towards the top of the image). In the annotated version of the image, you can see many other galaxies identified by the astrometry tool.

Interestingly, it was an observation of movements of hundreds of galaxies in this cluster that resulted in the idea that there must be a lot more mass hidden in that area - one of the first hints of what we today recognize as a dark matter. In the Coma Cluster, it must account for a good 90% of its total mass, meaning that the visible galaxies only represent 10% of the matter in that region of space.

Galaxies

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7608294
PixInsight job	US4FMUN2J27447MG15Q6TB3Q7ZIG99IG
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	13h00m11s.60
RA (top/left)	12h59m15s.90
RA (top/right)	13h05m15s.93
RA (bottom/right)	13h01m05s.83
RA (bottom/left)	12h55m07s.48

Dec (center)	+27°59′20″.7
Dec (top/left)	+26°51′12″.7
Dec (top/right)	+28°15′26″.4
Dec (bottom/right)	+29°07′17″.1
Dec (bottom/left)	+27°42′38″.4

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Abell 1656 / Coma Cluster

Abell 1656 / Coma Cluster

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Abell 1656 / Coma Cluster

Abell 1656 / Coma Cluster

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