Omega Centauri
My favorite souvenir of our trip to Las Vegas. This was our Las Vegas night life: we headed up Mt. Charleston, about twenty five miles out of town.
We set up on a scenic pull-off. Our travel scope, a William Optics Zenithstar 66 on an Astrotech Voyager mount, was quick to set up. We rapidly caught Centaurus A, the weird cannibal galaxy with its victim's dust lane across its face. Once we found it, though, it was pretty obvious we couldn't see Om Cent from where we were due to a mountain ridge in the way - these objects do not get very high in the sky at 36 degrees N. We did some disappointed quickie observing for another half hour, but it was late and the next morning would be early.
Coming down the mountainside, though, we realized that Centaurus was well above the horizon, and that Om Cent should be easy pickings. The beauty of a grab-and-go scope is that it's no hassle to stop and set up - in five minutes, we were back in action and observing the best of all globular clusters observable from the US.
Omega Centauri is a massive cluster visually - I compared it directly to M13, flipping back and forth between them, and it seemed about four times the area and at least twice as bright. Due to the horizon effect, it didn't resolve into individual stars as well as the last time we saw it, but it was very impressive nonetheless.
We tried a number of different eyepieces with it, but my favorite view was my reliable 25mm Plossl with a 2x barlow. This allowed the mountainside with its vegetation into the image, which was such a striking picture that I sketched it as soon as we got back to the hotel room. Observing in the flatlands here, one rarely gets a view like this.
Omega Centauri
My favorite souvenir of our trip to Las Vegas. This was our Las Vegas night life: we headed up Mt. Charleston, about twenty five miles out of town.
We set up on a scenic pull-off. Our travel scope, a William Optics Zenithstar 66 on an Astrotech Voyager mount, was quick to set up. We rapidly caught Centaurus A, the weird cannibal galaxy with its victim's dust lane across its face. Once we found it, though, it was pretty obvious we couldn't see Om Cent from where we were due to a mountain ridge in the way - these objects do not get very high in the sky at 36 degrees N. We did some disappointed quickie observing for another half hour, but it was late and the next morning would be early.
Coming down the mountainside, though, we realized that Centaurus was well above the horizon, and that Om Cent should be easy pickings. The beauty of a grab-and-go scope is that it's no hassle to stop and set up - in five minutes, we were back in action and observing the best of all globular clusters observable from the US.
Omega Centauri is a massive cluster visually - I compared it directly to M13, flipping back and forth between them, and it seemed about four times the area and at least twice as bright. Due to the horizon effect, it didn't resolve into individual stars as well as the last time we saw it, but it was very impressive nonetheless.
We tried a number of different eyepieces with it, but my favorite view was my reliable 25mm Plossl with a 2x barlow. This allowed the mountainside with its vegetation into the image, which was such a striking picture that I sketched it as soon as we got back to the hotel room. Observing in the flatlands here, one rarely gets a view like this.