Abell 2162 is a 40 member galaxy cluster located almost a half billion light years away in the constellation of Corona Borealis at a declination of +29 degrees. Michael Feigenbaum has posted an excellent wide field view of this cluster
here.
I thought it would be interesting to focus on the details of the galaxies at the center of this cluster. I have done that in the past for galaxy clusters with good results. But not this time. I am disappointed in the result - numerous galaxies are visible but it doesn't have the "Wow" factor that I was looking for. I definitely should have dug deeper in my research to see that the density of this cluster at the center is not very high.
NGC 6086 is the largest galaxy in the cluster, towards the top of the image. It is a huge elliptical which spans 2 arc-minutes in our apparent view. At that distance, its estimated diameter is 250,000 light years. NGC 6085 is the 150,000 light year diameter face-on spiral at the bottom of the image.
The rest of the background field is mildly interesting in that it is a mixture of galaxies in the cluster (500 million light years away, many of which are marked on the Astrobin mouseover annotation) along with much smaller and fainter galaxies, located at least twice as far away.
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