This wonderful cluster of galaxies in the southern constellation of Hydra is framed by two nearby cool stars located in our own Milky Way, but the galaxies composing this cluster are over 100 million light-years away.
In this processing version of the Hydra cluster I have removed all stars but the three brightest ones, making this way better visible the many small background galaxies of the cluster.
A lot of manual work was done to painstakingly mask the image and make sure the faintest galaxies were not removed by the starless tool.
Even if I do not usually love much starless images, here I find it a good way to fully appreciate the richness of this cosmic archipelago and doing so I cannot stop imaging how many life forms are probably contained in the galaxies within this frame, and perhaps how many evoluted enough to look back at us as well...
The mouse over image is the same FOV before the stars removal, as can also be visible in the
uncropped version here.
Takahashi CCA250 (250/f5) - ZWO 6200MM - L (300m) R (60m) G (60m) B (60m) - AMT Observatory (
A.Lau/M.Lorenzi/T.Tse), Río Hurtado, Chile. Image processing M.Lorenzi.
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