This has been a tough winter for imaging. Nearly every clear night has had a bright moon in it within a few days of being full. Oddly, seeing has tended to be better than average however. This image was the only one that everything pretty much came together all winter. Seeing was better than normal and I had less moonlight to deal with. Still, to get all the color data I needed three months grabbing a frame here and there as the weather and moon permitted.
Abell 1367 is way too large for my limited field of view. I'd need about 6 of these in a mosaic to do it justice. This region seemed the most interesting when I was looking at an area to image. The cluster lies at a distance of about 300 million light years. Some are closer such as the large spiral to the lower left, NGC 3861 is only 240 million light years from us and the overlapping smaller galaxy MCG+03-30-094 is not really overlapping as it is at 345 million light years. These two may define the closest and farthest galaxy in the group or they may be unrelated. I couldn't find anything definite.
To the upper left of this pair is a very small interacting pair of galaxies collectively known as CGCG097-133. Oddly NED lists the individual red shifts of these two individually at about 650 million light years but lists the two galaxy group as having a distance of 248 million light years. That is obviously an error, likely keyed in by that famous Chinese astronomer Sum-Ting Wong.
The very peculiar (but not peculiar enough to make Arp's list) blue streak of a galaxy to the lower right is UGC 06697. A finder chart of the NGC galaxies in this part of the image is at:
http://www.ngcic.org/dss/n/3/n3845.jpg
The second image shows a cropped portion of this area of the cluster and marks two quasars. The one to the left is designated as [hb89]1141+202 NED02 by NED. It shows a cosmological red shift of z=2.2 which puts it's light travel distance at about 10.3 billion light years. That makes it the most distant object I have found in any of my images but I don't look very hard and likely have missed something even further. Though the far better than normal seeing allowed me to see fainter objects than normal. It's listed magnitude is 21. Fortunately, the moon was only a thin crescent when these were taken allowing me to go so deep for a change. Best I can tell the magnitude limit for this shot is about 22. The other quasar isn't as interesting being only 3.6 billion light years away light travel distance.
When working with such distances and relativistic speeds you end up with three distances to an object. The distance the light traveled to reach you is the normal one quoted. But since the universe has been expanding all this time the object was closer when the light was emitted. Best I can calculate (my math here isn't great) it was somewhat under 6 billion light years from us when the light left it over 10 billion years ago. It is now so far away, I calculate 17 billion light years or so, that it is now beyond our visible universe which is only about 13.7 billion light years across. So the light leaving it today, if it still exists which is doubtful, will never reach us even after an infinite amount of time because it is currently being carried away from us at a speed greater than the speed of light due to the expansion of the universe. And no this doesn't violate Einstein's speed of light speed limit. That doesn't apply to the universe's expansion.
A less compressed version is at:
http://www.spacebanter.com/attachmen...tid=1888&stc=1
14" LX200R, L=4x10' binned 2x2, RGB=2x10' binned 3x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME
Rick
01-May-2008, 04:39 PM
Too many galaxies? Abell 1367
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