Deep field images from Hubble space telescope are a milestone in modern cosmology. I remember well the astonishment when I first saw them, only recently overcome by Webb telescope images. Amazed by the great number of far galaxies in those images, last month I decided to accept a challenge: how far can I peer with my humble astrophotography setup (we are talking about a 72mm apo refractor and a unmodified Nikon reflex)? I wanted to understand how far a common astrophotographer can dive into space and time from his backyard. I must admit I have been quite surprised by the results…

I decided to photograph Abell 1367 field, a galaxy supercluster in Leo constellation, perfectly visible from my latitude during spring. I chose this cluster because it comprises more than a hundred of galaxies moderately far (it is at around 300 million of light years). Its brightest galaxy is NGC 3842, an elliptical galaxy of 12.78 magnitude, home of one of the most massive known black holes (a beast of 9.7 billion of solar masses). In the nearest space, the mass of this galaxy generates a gravity lens that amplify three far quasars.After 9.5 hour of total exposure, NGC 3842 clearly stands out in the middle of the image, surrounded by a great number of objects. In the rest of the field, hundreds of galaxies float in the space, clearly distinguished from the stars by their shapes and halos. Brightest and biggest galaxies reside in Leo supercluster and lay between 250 and 350 million of light years away. On the background, there are other tiny and dim galaxies (up to magnitude 20) whose distance is even greater: merging information from PixInsight astrometric reduction and HyperLeda catalogue (https://leda.univ-lyon1.fr/), for some objects I retrieved a distance up to about 2.5 billion of light years from us. However, two quasars near NGC 3842 are the real champions. Zooming in, two tiny dots can be distinguished: quasar QSO B1141+2013, at 3.6 billion of light years, and QSOB1141+202, at 7.3 billion of light years. Unfortunately, I could not resolve the third quasar, too dim and far. I find impressive that I could detect and resolve the image of an object whose photons started their journey when Earth did non exist and the Universe had less than half of its actual age. In addition to distances, I find impressive also the number and variety of galaxy in this fields: I detected 517 galaxies from PGC catalogue, but other are visible, so the real number of depicted objects is even greater; almost every type of galaxy appears in this field (elliptical, lenticular, spiral, barred spiral, irregular, ring, interactive…).

I added also a second version with the superimposed annotation of the object: salmon circles and cross represent NGC objects, light-blue circles represent PGC galaxy (without the label for concision). I zoomed some interesting area and represented them with inverted BW (and increased contrast) to highlight some faint structures (like some galaxy halos and streams) or structures inside most prominent galaxies.Hope you’ll enjoy, clear sky to everyone!