1 million galaxies!

[sgazer]

...well not quite, but there's a few! There was finally a gap in the clouds last night, but crikey it gets dark late now, I couldn't even start taking subs until 10:30pm and the clouds rolled in again at about 12:30am. I was going to continue with NGC4565, but I spotted a group of galaxies near it. Not sure what the group is called, but it's amazing to see so many in one area. Anyone know why they are in such a close group?

The are quite hard to see without zooming into the full size image, pretty much every fuzzy dot or blob is a galaxy and the CDC chart confirms there's a few of them.

Thanks for looking.

(14x5min subs, ISO800, 1000d, 150p-ds)

[acey]

Your pic shows Abell 1656, the Coma Cluster, which is by far the brightest and richest Abell Cluster viewable in amateur scopes. I visually observed it with a 12" last year and was able to see about 25 galaxies in the group's central region - a fantastic sight.

Looking at chart A8 in Uranometria, I believe your pic is oriented west up, with the prominent galaxy in the centre being NGC 4889.

NGC4565 lies a few degrees to the west (well out of shot) and is not a cluster member, I believe, but a much nearer (and larger looking) galaxy.

[Doc]

Lovely shot with as you say a million galaxies.

[ollypenrice]

Impressive, especially when you think what you are looking at.

As for why, it all got very interesting in the 193Os when the irascible Fritz Zwicky measured the velocities of cluster galaxies and found nothing like enough visible matter to hold them together. This was, arguably, the start of what would become the dark matter hypothesis, though it was galaxy rotation that really kicked it off.

(Zwicky was so irritable that one student or colleague suggested that the Zwicky become a unit of abrasiveness. Another countered that there was nothing in nature that reached the level of one Zwicky and that the Microzwicky would amply suffice...

Walter Baader thought that Zwicky might actually murder him.)

Olly