I thought it worth a separate post, repeating the post I put into gregbradley's recent thread on the Virgo Cluster.....my post about David Malin's very deep UK Schmidt images of galaxies, and the challenge that these objects and their detected V.faint features present to amateur imagers.....
Malin made a lot of very deep images of galaxies by means of co-adding multiple UK Schmidt films, and while it is
still not easy to go this deep,
some amateurs now do. Many of his very deep images of galaxies can be found at:
http://www.aao.gov.au/images
(Just click on "Deep Galaxy Images" and you will find the many very deep galaxy images by Malin)
There is a lot of
very weird stuff going on in the outer regions of these galaxies imaged by Malin, and much of it is now potentially imageable by very persistent amateurs.
Many of these strange phenomena have never been investigated properly by professional astronomers......
so imaging ultra-deep on galaxies is definitely one way for amateurs to find new things that have not been seen before!!
cheers,
mad galaxy man (is on the loose)