Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Draco (Dra)
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Abell 2218, Gary Imm
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Abell 2218

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Abell 2218, Gary Imm
Powered byPixInsight

Abell 2218

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Description

This object, at the lower right center of the image behind foreground Milky Way stars, is a galaxy cluster of thousands of galaxies located 2.3 billion light years away in the constellation of Draco at a declination of +66 degrees. I drizzled the image and cropped it significantly to show the detail of this cluster. The span of this image at the distance of the cluster is 14 million light years.

This object is the best candidate for imaging the weak arcs caused by gravitational lensing, where a foreground galaxy cluster acts as a supremely powerful lens to magnify and distort all galaxies lying behind the cluster core into long arcs. In this case, Abell 2218 is lensing the most distant known galaxies in the universe that are located billions of light years behind it.

As one of the predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity, I have always been excited about gravitational lensing and I imaged this object for longer than normal in an attempt to capture some of the weak lensing arcs. Alas, I am very disappointed that the lensing arcs are a bit too weak to show up in my image. Some of them may be there faintly but I think it is just my imagination - the aperture of my setup is not quite large enough. Nevertheless, it is still fun to capture images of objects that are 2.3 billions of light years away, even if i cannot capture the ones behind it that are 13 billion light years away.



The pretty white spiral galaxy on the right side is PGC 58586, at a relatively nearby distance of only 320 milion llight years.

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