Quote:
Originally Posted by pgc hunter
Interesting obs Paddy. Looks like you got some excellent seeing. You sure do well with resolving structure in galaxies, the one time I observed 2442
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Mr PGC Hunter!
Yeah, Paddy has got excellent visual sensitivity, as is plainly seen from his observations of galaxies.
I used to have excellent sensitivity when in my 20s and early 30s, but now that I am a much older bugger, I don't detect vanishingly-faint light as well as I used to.
My observation notes from "way back when" indicate that I had a very tough time seeing much detail (with a 10 inch) in NGC 2442 under normal dark-sky conditions, but I eventually did succeed in clearly seeing the bar and also the two (very different from each other) spiral arms; however, the sky conditions had to be very very good in order for me to accomplish this, which is an indicator that the surface brightness of this galaxy must be particularly low;
the NED extragalactic database gives both major & minor axis of this galaxy as being about 5 arcminutes, as does the ESO-LV catalog, so this object is very very extended!
cheers,
Robert
See also: in the astro-imaging forum, I have included an infrared image of this galaxy, in the thread about NGC 7793 by sjastro.