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Thanks for the interesting post, Alexander,
In visually observing a faint galaxy or faint HII region, or observing a faint feature within a galaxy or HII region, I would probably do a combination of the following things:
- looking fixedly, just to one side of the target object, while concentrating on the object itself, for 5-10 seconds, thereby allowing the exposure time of the rods to be used, and thereby allowing an image to build up.
- moving my eyes randomly and rapidly around the field, in order to relax or reset them
- looking fixedly just to one side of the target object again (but looking at the opposite side of the object to the side I looked at first), while still concentrating on the object itself. (again, for 5-10 seconds)
- looking straight at the object, for comparison with the views that I get using averted vision
- moving the telescope, just a very little, from time to time (as mentioned in mental4astro's post), which can make the object more obvious.
I repeat all of these steps when I observe a vanishingly faint Diffuse object, often repeating them many times, and I find that I do gradually build up a better idea about the morphology of the "very very faint object" in the eyepiece. This seems to be an additive process, and the various glimpses that I get of the object (or of features within the object) can be used to build up a better picture of it.
I have been known to persist for up to one hour on a single object, at which point my eyes are thoroughly fatigued.
If I am not sure whether or not I have seen something, I resort to some of the stratagems in my previous post within this thread (title: "When the eye+brain sees an intermittent feature - is it real?).
I think that this is my usual procedure when observing low surface brightness galaxies & very faint nebulosity...... but some of it has become very instinctive, so I will go to the telescope and check if this is exactly what I do.
Let's do some experiments, folks, and find out which procedures work best when we are at the eyepiece!
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