Abell 1656
After I found Pluto, I realized that I could photograph small objects at long distances. I had already made a nice photograph of the Antennae Galaxy [NGC4038] during my galaxy hunting. I have been into this avocation now for nearly 6 months and I have become comfortable with my abilities to move the telescope to a pin-point position in the night sky, to track objects once acquired, and to produce reasonable quality CCD images. The text around finding M-51 {in Galaxies} showed my initial success, the finding Pluto text {in Planets} my increasing knowledge and the Telescope Movements text {in Equipment} my increasing level of technical capability. NGC4038 was a magnitude 10.3 galaxy at 83 Million Light years. To find really deep-sky objects I would need to use the accurate telescope movement capabilities as well as the astrometric measurement techniques that I previously described. How deep can I go with my equipment?
I did some quick research about distant objects in book called “The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide” by Terence Dickinson & Alan Dyer. They talked about obtaining rich but fainter galaxy clusters. The Coma Berenices galaxy cluster, MSA#653 (Abell1656), was recommended as a good place to start. “Because of their great distance, each [cluster] is contained within an area only one or two degrees at most. Often, the entire cluster [of galaxies] can be seen in one field as a collection of faint, ill-defined smudges.”
The brightest members of MSA#653 are two 12th magnitude galaxies, NGC4874 and NGC4889. Surrounding these two galaxies are other 13th-16th magnitude galaxies. The minimum required aperture according to Dickinson and Dyer is 5 inches. I had to see for myself if I could find, track and photograph a cluster of galaxies (not stars) that are 350 Million Light Years from Earth. This is 2.1*10^21 miles [2.1 Sextillion miles]. Said differently, the light that I captured in my CCD chips on 7/7/2005 started traveling towards earth 350 million years before the moment that I stood at the end of my driveway to capture these photons of light. I was looking back into time a long way.
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The Corona Borealis Cluster (MSA#646; Abell2065) would be the distance record-holder for amateur astronomers at over 1 Billion Light Years. At over 400 times the distance of the Andromeda Galaxy, Abell2065 is the “edge of the backyard astronomer’s universe.” I have not yet tried to find it.
July 8, 2005