Credits and Copyrights: Overall Photons, Elisa Cuccu, Andrea Iorio, Fernando Linsalata, Giampiero Lilli, Roberto Volpini, Gianni Melis, Roberto Testi, Stephane Moinard, José Manuel López Arlandis, Michele Mazzola, Vitali Pelenjow, Leonardo Pelosi, Patrick Bisaillon, Aidan Guerra, Jeff Ratino, George William Hoffman, Vasile Unguru, Vakhtang Khutsishvili, Jonathan Schwab
Explanation: Meet the Perseus Galaxy Cluster, home to thousands of galaxies, sitting about 240 million light-years from us… Crazy, isn’t it?! And we are watching this from our backyards!
Thanks to 19 participants from different places, with telescopes ranging from 2.7″ to 11″, we reached a total of 392 hours of integration as part of the second Overall Photons project. What’s amazing about this? Despite most of the data being captured under suburban skies with less-than-ideal light pollution conditions, I’d say we pretty much nailed it!
Each of the fuzzy blobs in the image is a galaxy, together making up the Perseus Cluster, one of the closest clusters of galaxies. The cluster is seen through a foreground of faint stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Near the cluster center is the dominant galaxy NGC1275, seen above as the large galaxy on the image left. A prodigious source of x-rays and radio emission.
You can spot faint Galactic cirrus drifting across the field, and some delicate hints of H-alpha emission. Interestingly, this H-alpha comes from our own galaxy, as Perseus is so redshifted that its H-alpha line falls outside the range of standard 7-10nm wide filters. To capture the cluster’s hydrogen, we’d need a filter shifted further to the red – like centered in 672nm.
So, if these hydrogen clouds belonging to the Milky Way were generated by an ionization phenomenon or by a shockwave from a supernova, what and where is the cause of this phenomenon?