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Thanks, Paul, for the encouraging comments.
My posts in iceinspace explaining the morphology & structure of galaxies are my first communications with my fellow amateurs in a long time. I used to write an e-newsletter explaining the results of extragalactic research to a select audience of Intermediate to Advanced level amateurs, but this fell by the wayside; because the required time commitment interfered too much with my personal astronomical projects.
I suspect that, in visual observation, the equatorial dust lane of NGC 3628 would look relatively normal. I think that, with sufficient aperture and with a really dark and transparent sky, the abnormal thickening of the dust lane could also be seen.
My bet is that the unusual bending or bifurcation of the dust lane (at its two ends) may be beyond the ability of visual observation to discern.....but I hope that I am wrong about this!
The typical very-stretched amateur images of galaxies, and the logarithmic scale images of galaxies that are popular with professional astronomers, are a poor guide to what can be seen by eye; partly because faint features are deliberately displayed at abnormally high brightness.
The pre-CCD era Photographic images in the Hubble Atlas of Galaxies and the Carnegie Atlas of Galaxies actually give a more realistic (true-to-life) view of what a galaxy really looks like, as there is no fancy processing done on these images.
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