Omega Centauri (NGC5139) is a deep sky object in
the southern sky region. With the naked eye, this object is almost like another
ordinary star, but it has millions of stars packed together. Omega Centauri
could easily be located by taking a straight line beyond stars Hadar and Eta
Centauri, and a straight line beyond Acrux and Mimosa. The intersection of
these two lines is where NGC5139 is (see sketch below).
I was able to
capture Omega Centauri on June 16, 2010 from my backyard in Purwakarta with my Nikon D90. I will someday take a closer look and capture this object with my C6, and present the photo in this blog. God permitting!
With
its distance of 16,000 light years, and yet still visible, one could imagine
the vastness of this object. Its mass is equivalent to five million suns and
ten times more massive as compared to other large clusters. Within the local
group, its brightness is only comparable to Andromeda galaxy, M31.
This object was first discovered by Edmond
Halley in 1677. Observation on the center of Omega Centauri by Astronomical Institutes of the University of
Bonn revealed that this object consists of millions of giant red and blue
stars, and dwarf gray stars. The diameter of this cluster is about 150 light
years, and when we look at moonless clear night, its diameter is almost the
same as the moon. This is one of the oldest stars in the universe, with 16
billion years of age.
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| Omega Centauri (NGC5439), photo by Anglo-Australian Observatory |
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| Omega Centauri in the southern sky region, photo by me taken from my backyard in Purwakarta |
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