NGC6166, part of the Hercules Cluster

There is no entry in Wikipedia for this one, I imaged it because I found an article in Sky & Telescope magazine from a year or so ago that described galaxy clusters in Hercules and I thought that it would make an interesting subject.

This is a portion of Abell 2199, a rich cluster of galaxies in the constellation of Hercules. The Hercules Cluster is approximately 650 million light years distant. The largest galaxy in the center of the image is NGC 6166 There are an astounding number of galaxies in this field, close examination shows over three hundred small fuzzy objects. The faintest object PGC2152968 (according to info sourced from here) is at magnitude 19.9, although I'm sure that there are fainter objects visible.

I imaged it with the 16" Meade and SBIG ST-2000XCM one shot colour CCD camera. 9 frames of 5 minutes exposure were captured using CCDOPS software. This was also used to calibrate the light frames and to stack 7 of the 9 exposures into a final image which I then further processed in Photoshop CS3.