Quote:
Originally Posted by sally1jack
I do agree i like nothing more than seeing detail in a faint object.
I will check out those targets you have suggested & a few more
Are you in a dark site?
thanks phil
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Phil,
I am, these days, only an occasional visual observer. Though between 1971 & 1999 I was a regular at dark sky sites, and I soon decided that I was only interested in viewing galaxies!
Most of my work/play now involves comparing and contrasting tens of thousands of galaxy images, with a view towards understanding the morphologies and properties of the the bright galaxies in the nearby universe (the sample that I study is several thousand individual galaxies, to a limit of Blue magnitude 13.5-13.7)
I have also collected very large amounts of data, from many Galaxy Catalogs and many Galaxy Atlases and also from scientific papers, about many of these galaxies;
perhaps I will publish this information (online, and/or in paper form) one day.
These days, I use "other peoples' data" because I find that visual Deep Sky observing can show only a limited amount of detail on galaxies, due to the low resolution of the eye at faint light levels that thereby causes galaxies to look fuzzy when viewed in the eyepiece.
(However, my fundamental knowledge of galaxies has been greatly aided by having viewed many galaxies with my eye)
I recommended a very unusual form of visual galaxy observing in my previous post....... because the central regions of galaxies are relatively bright, and an angular resolution of 1-2 arcseconds, which is sometimes available to the deep sky observer, can show interesting detail.
I may try to write a post for the "observational and visual astronomy" forum, explaining in more detail the sorts of structures that can be seen in the central parts of spiral galaxies.
cheers, Robert