[ngcles]

Hi Robert & All,

Thank you for doing a bit of research there to find that small amount of info. I had a very quick poke through SIMBAD (have I mentioned before how much I hate the SIMBAD interface?) and found very little like you.

It was one of those interesting moments when I went to observe IC 4567 (not the central galaxy but a spiral near the southern edge), I picked up the name off my list of things to do, entered it in the Argo, hit the slew button and took a look in the eyepiece. I wasn't expecting to see a galaxy cluster! I hadn't looked at the map before-hand. As it happened the centre of the cluster was not far inside the field-stop and I saw 5 galaxies immediately and said to myself "holy-mackerel!" -- or words to that effect anyway. Took a look at the map and then found I had a whole cluster to see. It took 25-odd minutes to tease out and positively ID all nine eg.

The comment I made on the number of dwarfs persent is a reasonable assumption -- there is no proof but dwarves outnumber large eg more than 5/1 generally so that would mean about 40-odd dwarves that are too small or too faint to show even on the DSS -- maybe even double that number.

About half-way through observing, I just began to wonder how big (in light-years my eyepiece field was at the cluster distance? I didn't want to get too carried away calculating it but after a couple of minutes of mental maths I came up with a figure approx 1.4 million ly for my 9mm. It turns out to be 1.28million ly actually with a proper calculation (assuming the average recessional velocity ~ 4800km/sec) accurately reflects actual distance.

That's a biiiiiig picture!


Best,

Les D