[ngcles]

Hi All,

Managed to put a tick in the little box on a project I've been waiting to tackle for about nine months.

Predictably yes, I saw another very small, very faint galaxy. This one's a bit special -- ESO 146-8 close-by to the Indus-Tucana border.

With a B magnitude of 16.76, yes, it is very, very faint even for a 63.5cm telescope -- the B magnitude corresponds to a true visual magnitude of about 15.8. It isn't a QSO or a BL Lacertae type super-luminous object with an active nucleus -- it's just a "normal" galaxy.

Not big either 1.1 x 0.3 arc minutes in extent. There are literally tens of thousands of galaxies of this sort visible in very large amateur telescopes, so, why this one?

The answer lies in its red-shift: (z)1.76884 that yields a recessional velocity of 48,400 km/sec ... or about 16% of c.

Plug a Hubble constant of 71.5km/sec/Mpc into that and assume a flat geometry for the Universe, it implies a whopping distance (more accurately look-back time) (ie for how long have these photons been travelling) of 2.206 billion light years.

This is the most distant "normal" galaxy I've personally ever observed. It broke my previous distance record by about 900 million ly.

Happily, there is a distinctive, compact bunch of magnitude 13-15 stars immediately to its south that made pinpointing the exact spot quite easy. At x347, it was intermittently visible, glimpsed occasionally every several seconds as the seeing came and went, about 10" diameter but no visible structure.

I've attached a DSS image -- north is up and east to the left. Yes that's it right in the centre -- the tiny, apparently face-on barred spiral that also seems to be interacting with another yet fainter galaxy immediately north.

Happy observer retires to bed!

Best,

L.