Hi Rolf,
Agreed, these images are awesome; but awesomeness doesn't always get the attention it deserves from professional astronomers.
For instance, I think that the intricate details in your ultra-deep N5128 image are also awesome......but it is very hard to find a "pro" who is willing to take on the task of modelling these features and their origin.
(mostly they obsess about the orbits of the stars, globulars, and planetaries in NGC 5128.....hard to get them to "look sideways" from this at the actual distribution of the stars in this galaxy......these are often narrowminded people)
I don't think anybody on this planet really understands the features in the intracluster light. It really came into prominence only since year 2000, and the number of astronomers who give it some thought is still small.
The study of this phenomenon is in its infancy;
at first, with their ever deeper CCD observations of elliptical galaxies located within clusters of galaxies, professional astronomers were looking for an outermost galactocentric radius at which there was no detectable light from a galaxy itself;
but they never found an outermost "no light" radius in many elliptical galaxies that are located within clusters;
instead, there was a changeover to a vanishingly-faint diffuse light with different properties (colours, stellar velocities & motions, etc) from the light of the galaxy itself.
M86 is a particularly interesting case of this; the integrated (total) magnitude of this galaxy keeps on increasing as you sum up its light to ever greater radii, and there is no sign of this trend stopping even at very very large radius!!
Cheers,
Robert
Image of the bizarre outermost light distribution of M86 (it is the object in the centre of this field):
(this is one of Malin's deep "co-added Schmidt films" images)