At 280 million light years distant the Leo cluster is around the same distance from the Milky Way
as the Coma cluster (Abell 1656), and together they make up the bulk of the
Coma supercluster.
The supercluster is part of a string of clusters including the neighboring Hercules cluster that in turn make up
a huge sheet of galaxies known as the Coma Great Wall.
The Great Wall is just one of the larger aglomerations of galaxy clusters that shape the three
dimensional spider's web of filaments and sheets surrounding vast empty voids - creating
the foam like structure of our universe at the largest scales.
NGC 3842 is one of the two large eliptical galaxies that dominate the center of the cluster.
Around the galaxy are arrayed three quasars.
These quasars were used as
"evidence"
by Halton Arp to bolster his theory that
quasars are ejected from the cores of galaxies, and not cosmological objects.
This theory has been completely sidelined in modern cosmology due to several lines of complementary
evidence for these objects being at cosmological distances.
The accepted view is that these immensely bright and distant objects are powered by supermassive
blackhole accretion disks.
One of the quasars in this image ([VV96] J114405.3+195603), a 21st magnitude object, exhibits a red shift of z2.2.
This equates to a distance of 10.3 billion light years - by far (sic)
the most distant object that I am aware of capturing in one of my images.
Due to its distance and the expansion of space, it is travelling away from us at 246,449 km/s - more
than 80% the speed of light.
There are several "long tailed" spiral galaxies in the Leo cluster, the most prominent being UGC 6697
located to right of and roughly pointing towards the large eliptical NGC 3842.
These infalling galaxies tend to exhibit enhanced star formation on their cluster facing side
and tails of stripped gas pointing away from the cluster,
both effects resulting from ram pressure with the intracluster medium.
Over longer periods this results in reduced star formation rates for galaxies within this "hot" zone as their gas is stripped away.
The center of typical galaxy clusters are dominated by old eliptical galaxies.
It is thought that the high incidence of galaxy collisions and mergers tends to
result in the formation of large eliptical galaxies. The Leo cluster is not typical in this respect and
has a higher ratio of spirals to elipticals than most, and for this reason it is believed to have formed relatively
recently.
Taken after system optical tilt diagnosed to be due to non-orthogonal
CCD mounting, and fixed with shims made from slices from a can of 7-UP.
Collimation still to be completely dialed-in.
First set of images with Borg guidescope attached.
Dithered. CCD setpoint 0C to avoid CCD window condensation issues (prior to heater fix).
