Located at a distance of 15,800 ly in the constellation of Centaurus, Omega Centauri is the largest globular cluster in the Milky way galaxy with a diameter of approximately 150 ly and is estimated to contain 10 million stars with a total mass equivalent to 4 million solar masses.

This evenings effort was primarily about testing the alignment and tracking of the new HEQ5 mount, however I also wanted to get some data to practice the post processing.  As at my current latitude omega centauri only reaches a maximum altitude of approximately 45 degrees, it is buried in fairly extensive light pollution.  If I can learn to deal with this level of light pollution then things will be easier when able to image from darker skies.

The above picture is the result of stacking 5 exposures of 120s each at iso 800, which have been calibrated using 3 dark exposures of matching duration and iso in Deep Sky Stacker (DSS).  The stacking process helps to improve the SNR apparent in each individual frame helping to eliminate some of the light pollution effects.  The resulting stacked image was then edited in Photoshop to crop to the area of interest and remove the residual light pollution effects as well as sharpening the image

Overall for a first attempt I am quite happy with the way this has come out, however there is still work to be done on improving the tracking (as evidenced by the egg shape of the brighter stars indicating periodic error in the tracking) as well as the post processing to further minimise the noise and bring out more detail.