If you descent deeper into the rabbit hole of astronomy you will soon bump into the work of Fritz Zwicky. This absolute legend did a lot of pioneering work on supernovae, black holes, lensing, dark matter and lots of other topics. He’s also famous for this quote: “Astronomers are spherical bastards. No matter how you look at them they are just bastards.” He was a special one.

One important contribution to science was his proposal of the idea of dark matter (dunkle Materie). He came up with this theory while observing the Coma galaxy cluster and the discrepancy between the speed of movement of the galaxies and the total mass of the cluster. Something unseen, he concluded, was keeping the galaxies from flying apart. Now this was in the 1930s and it would be only years later when Vera Rubin confirmed the existence of this “dark mass”. Fascinating stuff.

Anyway – lots of reasons to try to image this cluster.

I don’t think I really managed to capture it as well as the Perseus galaxy cluster in the fall, but I still like the end result. There are over 1000 galaxies in this cluster at a distance of over 320 million light years. And for once I managed to shoot the whole night without a single mount issue.