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Old 03-September-2003, 09:27 PM
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The Bad Astronomer The Bad Astronomer is offline
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Originally Posted by AK
Anyone have any idea what the dimmest (identifiable) object ever photographed is? It can't be much higher in magnitude than that, can it?
In the STIS Southern Deep Field, we saw objects of visual magnitude 31.5 with decent signal. We saw magnitude 31 objects for sure. They might be stars or galaxies; they were simply dots in the image. We'd need spectra to know for sure, and that takes literally a thousand times as long to do. That's unlikely, given that the deep field was a 10 day exposure.
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