The immensely rich galaxy cluster Abell 1656 in Coma Berenices with two giant elliptical galaxies NGC 4889 and NGC 4874 at its heart. Both are about 1

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The immensely rich galaxy cluster Abell 1656 in Coma Berenices with two giant elliptical galaxies NGC 4889 and NGC 4874 at its heart. Both are about 11th magnitude. The face-on spiral galaxy NGC 4921 is at lower left at 12th magnitude; the tilted spiral NGC 4839 is at lower right, also 12th magnitude. The field is peppered with dozens of fainter galaxies from the NGC and PGC catalogues, all around 13th to 15th magnitude. The two bright blue stars are 7th magnitude. I shot this on a less than ideal night, with haze moving in, so this is a stack of only 6 x 8-minute exposures at ISO 1600 with the Canon EOS Ra through the Astro-Physics 130mm EDT refractor at f/6 with the 6x7 field flattener. Shot May 5, 2021. Haze prevented more images to smooth the noise more. Autoguided with the MGEN3 stand-alone autoguider.

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Size: 5400px × 3546px
Photo credit: © Alan Dyer / VWPics / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No

Keywords: 130mm, 1656, 4839, 4872, 4889, 4921, abell, astrograph, berenices, cluster, coma, eos, galaxies, galaxy, mgen3, ngc, pgc, ra, spring