omega

Omega Centauri

Music: Beach Boys - Kokomo -

Off the Florida Keys
There's a place called Kokomo
That's where you wanna go
To get away from it all

We'll put out to sea
And we'll perfect our chemistry
By and by, we'll defy
A little bit of gravity

Omega Centauri is the largest and brightest globular cluster in the Milky Way Galaxy. At a distance of 16 thousand light years, it contains several million stars and a central intermediate-mass black hole of about 40 thousand solar masses. Omega Centauri is so much larger than other globular clusters, that some scientists suspect that in may have developed from the core of a dwarf galaxy that was captured by the Milky Way. Most globular clusters in the Milky way have stars of a uniform age near 12 billion years, and similar chemical composition termed "metallicity." In contrast, Omega Centauri's stars have a range of ages and metallicities.

At a declination below -47 degrees, Omega Centauri can usually be seen and photographed only from southern skies. For this photo, I traveled to the Winter Star Party in the Florida Keys, at a latitude of 25 degrees north. This image combined 50 minutes of red, 30 minutes green and 25 minutes of blue exposures, all unbinned. An ST2000XM camera was used through an Astro-physics 4" refractor at f/5 on an AP400GTO mount.