Abell 1656 Coma Cluster (Joe Niemeyer)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Coma Berenices (Com) · Contains: IC 3955 · IC 3973 · IC 4040 · IC 4042 · IC 4045 · IC 4051 · NGC 4860 · NGC 4864 · NGC 4865 · NGC 4869 · NGC 4871 · NGC 4873 · NGC 4874 · NGC 4881 · NGC 4883 · NGC 4886 · NGC 4889 · NGC 4895 · NGC 4896 · NGC 4898 · NGC 4907 · NGC 4908 · NGC 4911 · NGC 4919 · NGC 4921 · NGC 4923

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Abell 1656 Coma Cluster

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Abell 1656 Coma Cluster

At first glance this image is not too impressive -- just a bunch of little smudges amongst the stars. However, there are actually over a 1,000 galaxies in this field of view. Can you count them all? This is the Coma Cluster, cataloged as Abell 1656, and located over 320 Million light-years from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices. The brightest galaxies in this image have magnitudes ranging between 12-14, which is incredibly dim due to the great distance. The two bright blobs near the middle are supergiant elliptical galaxies NGC 4874 (bottom) and NGC 4889 (center). The nice spiral galaxy at the top is NGC 4921. All of the elongated shapes in this image are separate galaxies. I zoomed in and tried to count them but lost track at around 100. And to think that each of these galaxies contains an average of perhaps 100 Billion stars -- it is truly mind blowing.

I made this image from a stack of thirty 300-second exposures that I shot at 2310mm focal length, calibrated with 20 each dark, flat, and dark flat frames, then post-processed with StarNet++, Topaz Denoise AI, and Photoshop.

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
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Top pick nominations

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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
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Amateur hosting facility
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Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

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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Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4663027
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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