Malin 1 - LSB Spiral Galaxy
Malin 1 is a gigantic Hubble Type "SB0a" spiral galaxy located 1.2 billion light-years away from Earth in the southern part of the constellation "Coma Berenices"
and can be observed best in spring. It was discovered in 1986 by the Australian astronomer David Malin, after whom it was named.
Its diameter is given as 650,000 light-years, which would make it 3-4 times the size of our Milky Way. Some more recent sources even put its size at 750,000 or
840,000 light-years. This makes "Malin 1" the largest spiral galaxy currently known in the universe. The huge outer spiral arms are extremely faint, so that the
galaxy is also classified as an LSB spiral, whereby the abbreviation LSB stands for "Low Surface Brightness". The inner spiral arms are significantly brighter and,
with a diameter of 30,000 light-years, also much smaller.
As "Malin 1" interacts with two smaller galaxies, it is assumed that the spiral arms have become so huge due to tidal effects.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In my 20" Dobsonian, Malin 1 was visible at magnifications of 290x to 380x as a very faint, small patch of light that could only be seen with averted vision.
I assume that I only saw the inner part of the galaxy - the outer, huge spiral arms unfortunately remained hidden from me.
To the south lies the 13.6mag bright spiral galaxy NGC 4571, which is much more impressive in the eyepiece than Malin 1.
