Abell 370

[tomato]

This is another of my "how deep can you go" efforts, Abell 370 in Cetus. This is 305 mins made up of roughly half LRGB with the Esprit150/ASI178 and half with the Esprit150/IMX571 OSC. Calibrated and stacked in APP, processed in PI and AP. I have only used NoiseXterminator on this one, StarXterminator included the galaxy cluster with the stars, so BlurXterminator made them into neat and tiny red stars.

This is the most distant of the Abell clusters, some 4.1 billion light years away. I was hoping for perhaps a tiny hint of the gravitational lensing arcs as seen on the HST images, but I was being too optimistic. This object only achieves an altitude of 35 degrees from my location, right above my neighbour's roof.

Thanks for looking.

Crop

 

[Craig a]

Some of my favourite things to image and look at are galaxy clusters, I did the Perseus galaxy cluster this week, although not as spectacular to look at as some of our own galaxys show stopper nebulas, there’s just something about these images that gets my mind working overtime, and the fact that the photons took all that time to get to our cameras sensors is astonishing there’s no way on earth that there isn’t any other life out there I refuse to believe it😂

well done for having a crack at this 

[Paul M]

I doesn't look much for a whole nights work or multiple nights even, but its a great achievement to look so deep into the Universe.

When I see some of these obscure targets I always think that I'll look them up myself someday. But the reallity is I'm lucky to get 2 clear nights that I can use in any one season. The chances of gaining 300+ min of data on a single target seem slim unless that lottery win comes along and gets me a dark site with an observatory!

As Craig above, I too looked at the Perseus cluster during the recnt clear spell. I think I only grabbed a couple of subs and then abandoned it for a target with more sparkle. Should have kept with it...

[ONIKKINEN]

Excellent, love seeing these kinds of images even if they dont have the visual awe of a shiny nebula or a nearby galaxy. Some real sense of scale with the giant galaxy cluster appearing as a small faint grouping of fuzzies, truly unthinkable distances here.

Regarding StarX accidentally removing the faint fuzzies, you could manually add them back to the starless layer and include those in a further stretch to lift them up behind the much brighter stars. I tried that with an image of the coma cluster i took last spring, took a couple of hours to sift through the hundreds of galaxies and manually erase them from the star-layer to add that back in to the starless layer (with some subtract and screen etc, you get the idea). "fixed" starless layer of my experiment below:

90% of these are removed with StarX and appear in the stars-only layer. Never processed it fully and just did it as a proof of concept, looks like your faint fuzzies could benefit a little from the same treatment.

[tomato]

9 hours ago, ONIKKINEN said:

Excellent, love seeing these kinds of images even if they dont have the visual awe of a shiny nebula or a nearby galaxy. Some real sense of scale with the giant galaxy cluster appearing as a small faint grouping of fuzzies, truly unthinkable distances here.

Regarding StarX accidentally removing the faint fuzzies, you could manually add them back to the starless layer and include those in a further stretch to lift them up behind the much brighter stars. I tried that with an image of the coma cluster i took last spring, took a couple of hours to sift through the hundreds of galaxies and manually erase them from the star-layer to add that back in to the starless layer (with some subtract and screen etc, you get the idea). "fixed" starless layer of my experiment below:

90% of these are removed with StarX and appear in the stars-only layer. Never processed it fully and just did it as a proof of concept, looks like your faint fuzzies could benefit a little from the same treatment.

Thanks for the suggestion, I will attempt another version with some star reduction at some point, but I had just got hold of BlurXterminator and was itching to try this on some more photogenic subjects.

[wimvb]

Great image. The gravitationally lensed galaxies are elusive, and probably beyond the specs (or at least beyond the grasp) of your gear. Although, with BXT not entirely unthinkable.

Whenever I try my luck on this faint stuff, I don't use noise reduction nor star reduction. After all, these are never going to be "pretty" pictures in the ordinary sense.

Btw, NED gives a Hubble distance of 1655 Mpc, which is closer to 5.3 GLy, not 4.1.

Edited December 20, 2022 by wimvb

[kirkster501]

Superb, I love the distant galaxy clusters and can never see enough of them.  They make us feel very small.  I may give this a go too.  They need a ton of data to make them work.

Shameless plug of my own post too, if you don't mind: