NGC 5139 Omega Centauri is the brightest and largest globular cluster.
To the naked eye it looks like a peculiar fuzzy star. Estimates of the number
of stars it contains vary widely. Situated in the southern sky it contains somewhere
between 700,000 and 1.5 million stars.
Canon 350D at Prime Focus LXD-75
Click the image at left to see a larger close-up view. Omega
Centauri is home to a million stars. I might have missed one or two, but I captured most
of them in this shot! Count them.
The linked image is cropped (cut to size), but
is represented at the true pixel dimensions as recorded by the Canon 350D (i.e. no digital
zooming).
This is a wide-field context shot. The original image must be shrunk
to fit onto the computer's 1280x1024 screen size. I like wide-field views of
the subject. It gives you some context to where the object sits in relation to the
objects around it.
Mintron Video at Prime Focus
LXD-75
Bit primitive but the little Mintron camera did a sterling job on this
cluster. On the TV it looks quite spectacular. Remember its resolution is only
795 x 596 pixels.
