Date: July 19, 2009
Location: Island Star Party 2009, Malahat, BC, Canada

I was inspired by Bill Keel's work on Abell 2151 http://www.astr.ua.edu/gifimages/hercules.html and wanted to take advantage of the dark skies to take a deep field photo of this fascinating area of Hercules while attending the Island Star Party,. This photo shows Bill's area of study in a wider field - his photo would cover a smaller area near the bottom centre of my photo. There are numerous interacting galaxies to be found in this area, which results in some bizarre shapes. I included a much wider field, because upon examining my photos I realized that although the action is concentrated in the area examined by Bill, the outer fringes also yield some very interesting galaxies.

Please maximize your web browser, otherwise you will not see the small galaxies to be found in this image. <F11> maximizes most web browsers.

Equipment: Canon 50D dSLR mounted prime focus on a Borg 101ED f/4 Astrograph mounted on an HEQ5.

Exposures: 81 x 1 minuteat ISO 1600

Conditions: Temperature/RH varied from 11.8°C/54% when the series started at 12:07am to 10.6°C/92% at 3:35am, the end of the series. LVM 4.5, Transparency 4/5, Steadiness 4/5, clear skies

Processing:
ImagesPlus 3.75 - Auto-process - digital development from raw, dark & flat frame calibration, normalize, grading, alignment, average min/max exclude combine. Aggressive contrast stretch (BP 1049).
ACDSee Pro 2.5: crop, resize, reduce colour depth to 24 bit, save as jpg.