50 ASTRONOMY • OCTOBER 2019
What’s all this excitement and all of
the bold statements about the southern
sky about? I’ve been an observer for 40
years and have spent many thousands of
hours at the eyepiece. But there’s some-
thing really special about seeing the
Orion Nebula high in the sky, gleaming
in all its glory. And then swinging your
head around toward the south, in the
same sky and at the same moment, and
seeing the Carina Nebula, immensely
larger and brighter. What an incredible
thing! And all I need do for some to
remind them of how special Crux the
Southern Cross is to see, is to recall a
certain song by Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
But the rubber really hits the road for
deep-sky observers when it comes to a
whole gang of bright, southern objects
that most northerners don’t even know
about. Early in the evenings, Orion lies
overhead, and you can trace the Milky
Way southward through Sirius and Canis
Major down to Canopus, and toward the
horizon. The early period provides an
opportunity to see many objects you
might see from your American backyard,
but placed much higher in the sky. And
looking through one atmosphere rather
than many — the attenuated fog of par-
ticles and water vapor when objects are
low in the sky — makes a huge difference.
The late evening really cranks up the
excitement. Now we have the mainline
deep south rising. We can see the
Southern Cross, the Carina Nebula, and
many other objects in the area. There’s
the Southern Pleiades (IC 2602) and its
neighbor NGC 3532, two of the finest,
largest open clusters in the sky. What
about Alpha and Beta Centauri? How
cool is it to look at Alpha Centauri in a
telescope and know that it, along with its
little companion Proxima, makes up the
closest star system to the Sun, just 4.3
light-years away?
The early morning hours ratchet up
the excitement even further, for those
hardy enough to stay up really late. How
about seeing Centaurus lead Scorpius
and Sagittarius on a majestic rise, bring-
ing the direction of the center of the gal-
axy far higher in the sky than you’ve ever
seen? Centaurus itself hosts a long list of
treasures, highlighted by the sky’s great-
est globular cluster, Omega Centauri. A
medium-size telescope will show its great
ball of stars resolved so nicely that it
brings to mind images of orbiting this
Just north of Omega Centauri lies one of the sky’s most incredible interacting galaxies, Centaurus A
(NGC 5128). This peculiar system is the result of a galactic merger, and may presage what the Milky Way
and Andromeda galaxies will look like 5 or 6 billion years from now. MICHAEL SIDONIO
The largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky
is Omega Centauri (NGC 5139), visible to the naked
eye. Its million suns stand out spectacularly through
medium and large telescopes. TONY HALLAS