This was another test like my Volcano Nebula. I thought I would try to image a distant galaxy cluster from my skies and see what I got.

In order to help show the tiny galaxies, I really wanted to present the image as inverted, monochrome and starless. It also helps to be using a computer, not a phone. The impact of this type of picture is not immediate, you must pause and reflect. At the very least, it is a different image from the typical one!

The difficulty with starless images is that they will not plate solve when submitted. The plate solve annotations and Sky Plot will therefore be missing on Astrobin. So I submitted a white on black version with stars to get the annotations and Sky Plot, and saved them as alternate versions of the image. It is interesting to see that there are actually many more galaxies in the image too tiny for even the PGC library.

Abell 2162 is a member of the Hercules Supercluster. I have included a map of galaxy superclusters as we know them today to give you an idea of how distant the Hercules Supercluster is.

This shot is only 0.65 degrees wide and 0.50 degrees high using my Super C8, and 0.63 reducer and the ASI1600 slightly cropped. It is not a 'wide field' image (which is why I saved the Sky Plot ).

The brightest galaxy in this cluster is the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 6086 at magnitude 12.7.  It is a type cD galaxy typically found near the centre of galaxy clusters. These galaxies are known as 'supergiant ellipticals' or 'central dominant galaxies'. I found this galaxy to be slightly asymmetrical in my image, but this may be a flat field error too. In 2010 a supermassive black hole was discovered at the centre of this galaxy.

NGC 6085 is a spiral galaxy near the centre of the frame is magnitude 14.5, and lies at a distance of 455 million light years. The photons collected here predate vertebrate life on Earth....

CS
Bob