The original

The Coma Cluster of Galaxies. A Wide(ish) View    Was the result of 4 hours of subs taken over the course of a month.  This image includes more than 1.5 hours of additional data.  The goal with this image was to use the new NXT tools from Russel Croman in an attempt to preserve some of the finer image details within the background and to bring out what I determined were star streams surrounding the two principal eliptical galaxies, NGC 4889 and NGC 4874.  In particular, there is a distinct, nearly linear spike of a starstream that obliquely trails away from NGC 4874.  Whether it is caused by 4874's interaction with 4889 or if it is the other sizable galaxies that appear to be swarming around 4874, I do not know.  In addition to the more distinct starstream, There is an additional extended haze of star streams or shells that seem to extend smoothly from 4874 and envelope 4889.  Note this is a fairly wide field of view, making both these disturbed ellipticals appear fairly close together.  Most views of these two tend to process them such that they look smaller and farther apart.  Much has been written about the Coma Cluster, so I will not go on about the many interesting and important "finds" that this very large galaxy cluster has provided to science.  I will, however, list three:  1) the CC is one of the very rare clusters to have a radio halo around it.  2) The CC has an apparent magnetic field, which may relate to the first fact.  3) There is an apparent dearth of satellite galaxies within the CC.  This is apparently due to the meat-grinder effect of so many galaxies all in one place.  For me, one thing missing from such a large cluster as this is any strong gravitational lense arcs.  There is weak lensing that astronomers have used to clarify issues, but I sure would like to image one some day.

The other thing I wanted to accomplish with the new data and tools was to preserve some of the details of the background swarm of galaxies visible throughout my older image.  In that image, I felt that lack of control of the standard PI noise reduction, star reduction, etc. meant that I did great damage to those details.  The Coma Cluster is not known for its many unique galaxy structures.  Yes there are a few that are reachable with my 11 inch scope, but many barred, and ringed galaxies are just a bit small for my scope and seeing conditions.  Of course, one can find a stunning variety if you are willing to go to the Hubble archives or some of the larger ground-based images from professional observatories.  So, this left me with a goal to preserve as many of those tiny red distant galaxies, or unclassified objects as I could!  I am providing, with a bit of a chuckle, a revision (B) that will show a PI annotated image, which includes the GAIA DR2 database.  It stated that it found 26,000 items and subtracting duplicates, plotted a bit under 16,000 of them!  Sounds great, but looking closer, it still appears to have missed a great deal of the smudges.  Some are clearly galaxies, like tiny edge-on galaxies.  (Edit: I guess I stayed up too late, since the DR2 is stars only!  I think I wanted DR3, but cannot get that to work.  Assuming I have to download that.  So if anyone reads this and can help me out...  I tried GSC and that seems to offer a mix. As I say, it is all pointless if there are a stars in the catologue.  What I really want is probably the DES survey stuff.)  Clearly there is no point in annotating such a thing anyway...  What is fun is looking for distant galaxy clusters that have interesting distributions.  Some are almost perfect arcs or someother interesting structure.  At least the visible components to these clusters.  Pixel peeping is required to see this menagerie.

The title of this submission alluded to struggles I had with the NXT suite.  I think this sort of image pushes the limit.  To start, StarXTerminator is simply not up to the task of sorting all of these objects at the size and resolution this image provides.  I had hoped that the 2X drizzle integration I used would help SXT sort by shape stars from most non-stars.  No such luck.  This meant a lot more work me.  I really did want to reduce the stars to some extent to highlight the galaxies here.  And an accurate SXT would have helped in preventing my reducing those small galaxies.  So it became a manual masking task to go after the most egregious stars using the Game function.  Please understand that this is not a complaint with SXT.  I recognize that this is pushing the envelope for this sort of function.  And the latest AI libraries for SXT is clearly a vast improvement from earlier releases.  But If Russ Croman wishes to continue to challenge the SXT AI, this field is one to use for training!  Bottom line is that instead of using "Artificial Intelligence" to do my star reduction, I used "Brunelle Intelligence"!  But rest assured, no small galaxies were harmed in the processing of this image!  BXT functioned well with respect to star correction.  The dearth of strongly structured galaxies or other features meant that sharpening was not pushed so much by me here.  And I only really wanted to pick up those features that are visible at full screen anyway.  NXT performed well, as it always does.  But its limitations of restriction to the smaller scale noise meant that it was useless for the higher layer noise that I encountered during my stretch.  For this I used MMT with noise reduction only at levels 5 and 6.  Boy that process is painfully slow.  Started it and went to bed!  The noise I was dealing with was probably not an issue in the end.  But it kind of reminded me of images of the Cosmic Microwave Background.  I think I have pretty good seeing at my house, but not that good!  And my QHY is not able to cool to 1.5 degrees Kelvin!

I have also included a sky map of Milky Way dust imaged by AKARI FIS (Revision C), which includes the location of the Coma Cluster relative to the galactic plane and also proximity to obvious dust elements.  As you can see, the Coma Cluster is nearly at the galaxtic axis pole, with nary a dust cloud to be found.  I have seen some images of the CC which seem to show IFN lightly.  It seems hard to imagine given the location.  In any case, I put a pretty good stretch into this one, and given the time put into this with a very fast system I remain skeptical...