Abell 2152



The nearby cluster A2152 in the Hercules supercluster is actually the chance alignment of two clusters: A2152 proper at a redshift z = 0.044 and the recently identified background cluster, which we call A2152-B, at redshift z = 0.134.

      a2152.gif     Abell 2152 R-band image (4'x4' field of view)  

      a2152_color.tif:    Color image of Abell 2152 (2-band B-R composite, 5.6'x5.6' FOV)


JPEG color images with harder stretches (sharper contrast), better for 8-bit color:

      a2152_3.jpg:    Color image of Abell 2152, harder stretch

      a2152_4.jpg:    Color image of Abell 2152, even harder


Photometric redshifts by eye . . .

     From the above color images, it's pretty easy to pick out which early-type galaxies are in the foreground cluster (the whitish ones) and therefore at z=0.04, and which are in the background cluster (the orangish ones) and therefore at z=0.13. The relative K-correction is nearly 0.4 mag for (B-R) color between these two redshifts.
     Note, however that the strongly lensed object discussed in the lensing paper (AJ, January 2001), 25 arcsec north of the A2152 central galaxy is in the background cluster (probably) but is intrinsically blue and not early-type, so appears more white in the images.


Color-magnitude diagram  for this Keck/LRIS A2152/A2152-B field.

     The really prominent elliptical galaxy "red sequence" near (B-R) = 2.1 is appropriate to the z=0.13 background cluster.


John Blakeslee
Associate Research Scientist, ACS Project
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Johns Hopkins University
jpb@pha.jhu.edu