Google Earth Community: Abell Clusters, Distance 3, Richness 0

This is the 5th installment of listings of Abell clusters of galaxies. It contains 123 (phew) Distance class 3 clusters of Richness 0. The 56 Distance 3, Richness 1 and up clusters were provided in a separate list.

This list has 13 * clusters, and 3 ** clusters that are defiintely worth looking at (zoom in).

Frankly, the rest are currently not worth looking at, but you can zoom out and see supercluster structure.

It is interesting to compare these with the Richness 1 and up. These are noticeably more diffuse. The field of view is on average 50% larger than that of the richer clusters.

I also thought it was interesting that, of the good ones you can see, even though some of them had central galaxies that looked like cD galaxies, the majority of them had one or more well formed spiral galaxies in their central region. The richer clusters generally had no spirals -- the gas and larger members had disrupted and eaten them.

For an overview of Abell Clusters, with a list of the 4 Distance 0 clusters and the Virgo Cluster, see the "Abell Clusters" post here.

28 Distance 1 clusters are here.

22 Distance 2 clusters are here. There is also a discussion of "What is a cluster" in this post.

56 Distance 3 clusters of Richness of 1 and up are here.

Distance 4 and 5 have * and ** clusters, so I will work on entering them. Distance 6 only has good clusters where someone has added an overlay for something special. But, the numbers are getting daunting:

Distance 4, Richness >= 2: 29 clusters
Distance 4, Richness 1: 76 clusters
Distance 4, Richness 0: 330 clusters

Distance 5, Richness >= 2: 232 clusters
Distance 5, Richness 1: 738 clusters
Distance 5, Richness 0: 1060 clusters.

I will probably do the Distance 4, richness 1 and up by hand as I did these. My value add in this process (aside from the data entry grunt work) is trying to set the viewport to encompass the cluster as accurately as possible. For the higher numbers shown above, I think we will have to give that up, and I will instead write some code to convert the Abell data into KML, and make some assumptions about the proper viewport size.

Chris

Time independent link created.

Edited by ChrisHeinz (04/09/08 10:16 PM)