The Hercules Galaxy Cluster (Abell 2151)

[Datalord]

This is Abell 2151 aka The Hercules Cluster of Galaxies. It’s 500 million light years away and it has about 200 galaxies.

 

123 galaxies annotated in this image with my field of view and some of them are very special.

 

Let’s have a look at some of the more interesting galaxies.

NGC 6041 is the brightest galaxy of all of them. It’s 220,000 light years in diameter, way bigger than the Milky Way and it is 480M light years away. 

 

A bit above we find ARP 122, a pair of interacting galaxies. It’s not obvious in my image, but NGC 6041 is a bit distorted towards ARP 122, so all three galaxies are interacting. ARP 122 is in a category where the elliptical galaxy is distorting a spiral galaxy.

 

Further down the image we have ARP 172. These are in the category “Galaxies with diffuse counter-tails”. You can see how the tails of both galaxies are diffuse on opposite sides of the galaxy centers.

 

ARP 71 is in the category of “Spiral galaxies with small high surface brightness companions”. It’s an oddly specific category, but definitely applies to this pair. NGC 6045 is 180kly in diameter and the pair is 447MLY away.

 

ARP 272 is probably the masterpiece of the Hercules Cluster. Three spiral galaxies are in a beautiful dance (or dance macabre if you will), where they will devour and distort each other. These are 500MLY away.

 

I wanted to note the large star in the top of the image. It’s poetic name is TYC1507-998-1 and it is of magnitude 6.75. So it’s actually not visible with the naked eye, but it is blowing out this image.

 

Loads of other interesting galaxies. Go explore, I’ve spent a few hours on this image and more can be found.

[tomato]

Great image and write up, your image is much deeper than my 5 hr version, but I have a few more galaxies with my wider FOV.

[MarkAR]

Excellent work, that's a lot of galaxies for one frame.

[Allinthehead]

Very nice indeed, so many Galaxies.

[FaB-Bo-Peep]

Simply amazing!

[Ouroboros]

Amazing and fascinating. I confess to having never heard of it until now. How large an area do these galaxies cover, and what sort of magnitudes are we talking about.  Abell 2151 doesn’t seem to appear in SkySafari.  Where is it in Hercules? 

[Datalord]

9 minutes ago, Ouroboros said:

Amazing and fascinating. I confess to having never heard of it until now. How large an area do these galaxies cover, and what sort of magnitudes are we talking about.  Abell 2151 doesn’t seem to appear in SkySafari.  Where is it in Hercules? 

You're probably more lucky trying google for the Abell catalog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Abell_clusters

They're quite faint. For example, ARP 122 is magnitude 15. ARP 272 is 15, 16 amd 17.

[silentrunning]

Great image. I started imaging this cluster a while back but abandoned it for some reason, probably didn't see anything!