Good morning, fellow travelers. This month is mostly going to be devoted to one object, the giant globular in the far southern constellation of Centaurus in these May late evenings.
Globular star clusters are giant balls of stars, all bound by each other’s gravity. Omega Centauri (catalogued as NGC 5139, see my photo) is the largest such object by far known to mankind. From our latitude in Boerne, just under 30 degrees north, it barely skims the treetops to the south for about 45 days before dipping below the horizon. In other words, it’s actually a Southern Hemisphere object that we just get a glimpse of for a few weeks a year.
If we had excellent dark skies to the south from here, we could see it as a fuzzy star with the naked eye. From my hometown of Abilene in the 1960s and early ‘70s, I could see it easily with the naked eye to the south at Buffalo Gap State Park.
