You mean to see it like that visually? That can't happen in any scope. The eye captures light for about 1/10 of s second at about the same efficiency as the CCD I use did for 40 minutes just to get the luminosity data in this shot. Then it took another hour for the color data to be recorded.

So while you can see this galaxy visually and get some hints of mottling and lack of a core that's about it. Even a 6" will show the galaxy as a smudge of light. A 10" will show the mottling. No scope will show much more. Nor will you ever see the color as the intensity is way to low to activate the color "film" in your eye. Only the black and white rods will see this dim of light, not the cones that see in color.

Going to a bigger scope doesn't help much. There's a rule of optics that works against you here. You'd think it gets brighter as power mirror size goes up but power has to go up in the same ratio. If it doesn't the excess light misses the pupil of your eye so is never seen. Cameras My CCD doesn't have any of these limitations so can easily image far more than I can see.

I remember viewing Centaurus A that Iceman just posted using a 6" f/4, a 10" f/5 and a 12.5" f/6 all with a 5 mm exit pupil that did fit the eye. Even there oddly the angular size of the galaxy as seen by the eye barely changed. It looked just as big in the 6" as the 12.5" Though the 12.5" was running over twice the power so it should have looked twice as big in angular size. That's even a worse result than I'd have expected and I still can't explain it. The dust lane was more easily seen in the larger scopes however so that made sense.

To see galaxies as more than a smudge with a brighter center, even the major ones, you have to really learn how to train your eye and brain to work together to dig out faint detail from all the noise you eye sends the brain. You learn tricks such as gently moving the field of view and using averted vision while doing so. You learn which eye is best and where in its field of vision it sees faint stuff best. It's quite a learning process. The more you try the sooner you catch on. You also need very dark skies. Two nights may at first appear the same but one time you'll see things you don' the other. Not sure if its my eye or a subtle difference in the sky when that happens. Now that I'm entering my 7th decade of this hobby I don't see what I used to but still can easily out see our less experienced younger members with these eyes thanks to decades of learning what works and doesn't -- for me.

So while you can see dust lanes and star clouds (NGC 204 for instance) in the Andromeda Galaxy and start to see the spiral arms in the Whirlpool galaxy in an 8 or 10 inch scope, no scope will begin to show them as seen in photographs taken with much smaller telescopes. The photos are very misleading about what you will see visually.

On a side note, most times you see nice pretty pictures like this on the box the scope comes in run far away. This is usually just a marketing ploy to sell a rather poor telescope for far more money than it is worth. There can be exception but even those won't show you anything remotely close as far as nebula and galaxies go. The moon is a different story. It looks just like the photos. In fact, photographing the detail you see visually is quite a challenge. Planets like Jupiter and Saturn will look good as well, especially Saturn, but still rarely as good as the photo on the box, and certainly far smaller with less color and contrast than the photo on the box.

Rick