Quote:
Originally Posted by Robh
Hi Markus,
The statements made by Tony Flanders are estimations derived from his own personal experience using whatever telescopes he had at the time. And remember, we are specifically talking about surface brightness here. Even at the darkest possible site, the sky will have a minimum inherent skyglow value. Is this exactly 22 mags/sq arcsec as set by a SQM meter?
Whether the limit of 25 mags/sq arcsec for objects applies to telescopes of much larger size is an unknown here. Maybe you could get a bit more but not much more. Also, we are looking at the limits of detection of the human eye with whatever eyepiece we are using in this telescope. And, the sensitivity of one person's eyes can be very different to another persons. I'm not sure that you could give a definitive number as most objects are not evenly bright.
Regards, Rob
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Which is true also. It's quite possible to see just the nucleus and no spiral arms, for example. I'm just trying to find the best method to differentiate between objects I am likely to be able to detect and ones I won't so I can design better observing plans. Selfish, really :-)
-Markus