Quote:
Originally Posted by alpal
But Pluto is mag 15 & it's very small -
this new planet is say 10 times further away but much larger -
as large as Neptune.
I think an amateur may very well be able to get a little dot on their image.
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With stacking, I've hit mag 23 on a good night. Given the slow movement, you could stack multiple nights and probably get down to 25 or so.
But the practical reality is that unless you had accurate co-ordinates, you'll never be able to scan enough of the sky to even have a remote chance of finding it. You'd have to wait for it to move between your minimum of 3 stacks, search it, then go on to your next search field. To cover a reasonable portion of its orbit would take decades. Even that is assuming it is close enough to the sun to put it within reach. If not, go wait 5000 years.
So in real terms, the chance of an amateur finding this thing is approximately zero.
If you still doubt that, amateurs discover asteroids at mag 20-22 on a regular basis. Even at that same magnitude, amateur discoveries of TNOs are very rare, and there are hundreds of those still undiscovered that an amateur could potentially image.
So you've got a needle in a galaxy sized haystack.