A Deep Probing of the Coma cluster

We present here results from a deep spectroscopic survey of the Coma cluster of galaxies (29 galaxies between 18.98<m_R<21.5). Only 1 of these galaxies is within Coma compared to an expected 6.7 galaxies computed from nearby control fields. This discrepancy potentially indicates that Coma’s faint end luminosity function has been grossly overestimated and raises concerns about the validity of using 2D statistical subtraction to correct for the background galaxy population when constructing cluster luminosity functions.