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The southern skies, those witnessed primarily by inhabitants south of the equator, provide a rich and splendid array of astronomical objects. A recent publication (Astronomy Magazine, June 2000) reported on a survey of beautiful deep sky objects witnessed by northern observers versus southern observers. The authors developed a rating system to determine which hemisphere had the most beautiful deep-sky objects. They awarded 5-points to the best individual object in each object class, 3-points for second, and one point for third. They also awarded 5-points to the hemisphere having the best overall representation of each class. What did they find? Table 1* below summarises their results.
Table 1.
Clearly, southern observers are lucky. Let’s take Globular Clusters (GCs) for example. The best three GCs 47 Tucanae (NGC 104), Omega Centauri (NGC 5139), and M22, are all Southern sky spectacles. Omega Centauri is visible to the naked eye at magnitude 3.68 as a fuzzy patch of light and is easily resolved into pinpoints of light with a small telescope. Of course, many northern observers can see southern objects and vice versa. Were I to drive to the north of my island state at the right time of year, the Andromeda Galaxy could be seen just above the watery horizon. Moreover, there has been many images captured of Omega Centauri from the southern states of the USA. *Table adapted from: Sheehan, W., & Field, L. (2000). North VS South: Which hemisphere holds the most beautiful sky objects? Astronomy, June, 55-59.
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