Join the billion-light-year club

My fascination with billion-light-year galaxies began nearly 40 years ago when I read about the fabulously rich and distant Corona Borealis Cluster (Abell 2065) in Burnham’s Celestial Handbook. The cluster features several hundred elliptical (E) and lenticular (S0) galaxies packed into a 30’ circle, the size of the full Moon. Due to the remoteness of the cluster, its brightest members are quite dim — close to 16th magnitude — and Robert Burnham, Jr. warned they were “far beyond the reach of the usual amateur telescope”.

This was a fair assessment back in the 1970s. But a few years later I netted seven elusive fuzzies using my 45-cm reflector — after considerable effort. All were featureless glows, but the largest was 15.4-magnitude — a 15” smudge just 1.4’ east of an and formed a tight north-south pair that required high power to split.