Not exactly Hubble Deep Field but...

[lukebl]

... I captured this image of a tiny field of view in the constellation of Hercules, close to Serpens Caput, which shows an amazing cloud of galaxies around NGC 6047. I used my old MX716 CCD which only has 752x580 pixels and the field is only about 15 arc-minutes across, but I've counted at least 30-40 galaxies in the field down to 19/20th magnitude. So, hardly high resolution, but an amazing cloud of galaxies in a tiny field of view.

45 x 4 minute subs, MX716, 250mm f/4.7 Newtonian.

Here it is with labels:

And here it is in context, showing what a tiny field it really is!

[mdstuart]

Very nice..All a bit too faint for me to observe visually with my 10 inch. 6047 might just be possible with averted vision!

Mark

[Woody]

I love these deep field shots. Very nice.

[dc509]

excellent - amazing to try and get your head around just how much "stuff" is captured in this image

d

[Crunchard]

Very nice Luke, truly amazing what can be captured.

[theodore]

Superb, I'll have to give that area a go.

Theo

[RogerTheDodger]

Awesome Luke, I wonder what it'd be like with more exposure time...

[lukebl]

I revisited this area last night with the Canon 450d. Slightly surprised that the DSLR shows just as many faint galaxies as the CCD. In fact, a close examination of each image shows that the detail on the images is almost identical. Some of the galaxies on the DSLR image are at least mag 18.5.

To get an impression of the magnitudes here, the bright star at upper right is 6.89 magnitude TYC 1507-998-1, and the reddish one to its lower right is 10.44-mag TYC 1507-145-1. The edge-on galaxy in the upper centre of the grey box is 14.10 mag NGC6045.

45 x 5 min subs, unmodded Canon 450d, 250mm f/4.7 Newtonian. The grey box shows the same area as the original MX 716 image.

[Hypernova]

Very nice Luke, I always like to see these really quite deep images and it's something that I would like to try for myself when I eventually take steps in to the dark art of imaging.

I wonder how many more galaxies would reveal themselves with even more exposure time or by using a more sensitive chip?

[NickK]

Awesome image, I love it when you can look at a picture and then go "hey there's another.. and another.."

[RobH]

That's amazingly deep....certainly an area worth a lot of imaging time at some stage.

Thanks for sharing

[Worzsel]

These are my favourite type of images, they always get me really thinking about what must be out there!

I love the way you've laid it out' thank you

[FraserClarke]

Nice job Luke.

You might see even fainter things if you look at the images in negative; black on white. The eye is apparently better at seeing faint black smudges on a white background than the other way around...

[mert]

Wow, these are great, good going