Abell 2151, Hercules Galaxy Cluster (Doug Summers)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Hercules (Her) · Contains: IC 1170 · IC 1178 · IC 1181 · IC 1182 · IC 1185 · IC 1192 · IC 1193 · IC 1194 · NGC 6039 · NGC 6040 · NGC 6041 · NGC 6043 · NGC 6044 · NGC 6045 · NGC 6047 · NGC 6050 · NGC 6054 · NGC 6056

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Abell 2151, Hercules Galaxy Cluster

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Abell 2151, Hercules Galaxy Cluster

The Hercules Galaxy Cluster contains about 200 galaxies, and is about 500 million light-years distant.   It's not a particularly dense cluster, but it does have a high proportion of spirals vs elliptical galaxies. It forms but a part of a larger Hercules supercluster and even larger "great wall".

In this cropped ( .73 degree x .42 degree) image, we see a "window" with a true size of 6.4 million light-years by 3.6 million light years. That's a pretty big window!    Although the galaxies are small, several have good spiral structure. There are multiple interacting pairs, and even a few sets of tidal tails.     A close look at IC 1182 shows a jet, but a paper by Bothen et. al. suggests that the jet is more likely a result of a collision.   It sure looks relativistic even if it is not.

FWIW, I think the most difficult decision related to this image is where to draw the line for a crop.   If you keep the whole field, everything is so small. If you crop too much, the objects you keep are bigger, but you lose other interesting parts of the field.    This is a compromise, where I tried to keep the center portion of the cluster intact (at the expense of lesser galaxies further out).   This object seems worth a closer look....

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Description: I've added integration time (now 8.3 hours @ f/2.2). This is about where I think diminishing returns is at. I would have liked to get a bit more color out of this, but I guess we're lucky to have any with an object that's 500 million LY distant....

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Celestron RASA
The OSC Club (One Shot Camera)

Galaxies
Galaxy Groups / Clusters
z-Chiricahua Astronomy Complex

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7650664
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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Abell 2151, Hercules Galaxy Cluster

Abell 2151, Hercules Galaxy Cluster

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Abell 2151, Hercules Galaxy Cluster

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