Dr. Marv’s posts (here and here) about tagging Omega Centauri last night from CRO with binoculars had me thinking:
Why haven’t I tried harder myself to view this? After all, Globular Clusters have become my favorite deep sky objects.
He rightly points out that from our longitude, less than 7 degrees is about the best we can hope for.
And then I remembered! Last year, my wife gifted me a nighttime observing session near Lake Tekapo in southern New Zealand.
This WAS one of the targets that was very easily observable there under such dark skies!
Thankfully, my tour guide captured these two photos for me.
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Here is one taken from CRO using Mitch’s telescope back on 30 April 2022. We did a side by side comparison with a 12” Dobsonian. Could barely see it in the big telescope.
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I wondered about pointing that low against the southern horizon from CRO. Wouldn’t the view be impacted by the light dome from Weatherford or Hinton?
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Well, if i could see it in mere binoculars @ 6.5 deg, a reasonable telescope will see it just fine from CRO. The Meridian is between those light domes. My timing was very close to transit
The accompanying digital images are very good. I like Tom’s for brightness. Mitche’s (it’s NOT a telescope)! catches more stars.
But then what do i know? I’m visual only. Just loving the experience.
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I remember that image of Omega Centauri! That was the very first time I had my eVscope 2 out at CRO. And it is a telescope, Marv. 
That image, which was only 24 seconds, was the one that had Eileen drooling to get a smart scope! It took a while for her to get one, but she finally sucumbed to the dark side and got a Seestar.
Here is the full 5 min that I took that evening.
This comparison has me curious. I knew that the image captured from New Zealand would have benefitted from it being almost directly overhead (vs at the horizon)…
But I’m having trouble trying to identify the rotation between the two images…
From my memory of Orion, I recall thinking that it was about a 90-180 degree rotation.
Here it is from Waikiki Beach last night at 21 degrees. If you look at the first picture it has a blue looking star at about 9 o’clock the second picture it’s at about 12 o’clock.
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