I get the same thing when I read all the total dark sky stuff where they
act as if a naked eye human can see 8.0 mag if the sky were dark enough.
When I was young I could swear it was 6.xx from Nowhere Central West
Virginia, which still show up on the "very dark sky" counties.
Now when I looked through a scope, usually the school 10" I'd guess
about 14 or 15 and it had the scope in one of these dark places away
from the 5 lights you can see on yonder mountain from the other side of
this mountain.
It will be inteersting if I start to get observing more here in Northern
California. I don't think I will get away from Watsonville which is
pretty brightly lit to the SLV which is pretty good if one is in the
middle and can avoid the skyglow from SJ or SCZ.
Have Fun,
Sends Steve
Mark Wagner wrote:
> Bruce Jensen said:
>
>> My recollection was that for an 8" it's about 13.5, and for an 18"
>> it's about 16. A ten is probably about 14.
>
>
> After a bit of searching, I found references that said mag 14.5 - for
> stellar objects. Looking over some galaxy fields I was observing I
> see I had to be in the mid-14's. So, it raised the question, mag 14.5
> under *what* conditions. I assume the mag 14.5 is for perfect
> conditions, which are generally defined as naked eye mag 6.0, right?
> So, if I had better than naked eye 6.0, the limiting mag through my
> eyepiece can exceed 14.5, correct? Here is a rather interesting page
> I just found that for me, not knowing all the variables to plug in,
> resulted in a limiting mag in my 10" scope at 120X of 16.11 at zenith:
>
> http://www.go.ednet.ns.ca/~larry/astro/maglimit.html
>
> I did this calculation because at mag 14, The Sky was not showing
> nearly the number of galaxies around NGC3269 as I counted.
>
> Mark
>
>
Received on Wed Mar 23 00:52:49 2005