Omega Centauri from the Northern Hemisphere (James R Potts)

Omega Centauri from the Northern Hemisphere

Not a whole lot of people can capture this target north of the Rio Grande, but I was barely north. Last week I attended the Texas Star Party in Fort Davis, we did not have the best weather, but did get a few nights of imaging. Even in south Texas, this big ole cluster only gets up to 11.8 degrees in the horizon and is not there very long. This is just about 6 minutes of data, but I was excited to get this. My scope was basically horizontal and I was worried people walking around would walk into my FOV. Given the short duration of capture and the extremely low location of this target, I was pretty pleased with the results, which is a testament to the dark skies at Prude Ranch. FYI, this image is not cropped, it basically filled the view of my 1000 focal length scope.

As I am sure most know, Omega Centauri is the brightest and largest globular cluster in the sky. It is so massive that many think it was a dwarf galaxy that merger with the Milky Way. The Greek astronomer Ptolemy listed this object in a star catalogue in the 2nd century A.D. Edmond Halley was the first to document Omega's non-stellar nature. Omega Centauri is one of the closest globular cluster at around 15M light years away and is estimated to be 300 light years across. Omega Centauri contains several million stars and around 5 million solar masses and is about 10 times as massive as the typical big globular.

In 2008, using images from the Hubble telescope, astronomers discovered an intermediate sized black hole at its center. The is fairly good confirmation that Omega Centauri is the remaining core of a small galaxy,

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7768303
PixInsight job	CSRJ0JK4VWVU5L762BJK7MIDWIINW80M
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	13h26m49s.156
RA (top/left)	13h26m30s.565
RA (top/right)	13h22m34s.856
RA (bottom/right)	13h27m07s.290
RA (bottom/left)	13h30m59s.151

Dec (center)	-47°31′24″.49
Dec (top/left)	-46°43′46″.50
Dec (top/right)	-47°52′28″.48
Dec (bottom/right)	-48°19′08″.81
Dec (bottom/left)	-47°09′49″.55

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