Draft:List of galaxies by surface brightness

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Instructions · What links here · List of galaxies by surface brightness (talk: + · bio) · (log) · Copyvios report · reFill · Citation Bot · (Search: Google, Wikipedia) · Submitted 22 days ago by Pycubes (talk: D · +) · Last edited 5 days ago by WereSpielChequers

Comment: Most lists following the format "List of X by Y" usually get declined, see WP:NLIST - not saying it isn't useful, lists like these are just too much of a headache to maintain. monkey_smashing^keyboards (talk) 23:06, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

This is a list of galaxies sorted by surface brightness. Surface brightness is a measure of how bright an diffuse object like a galaxy or nebula appears as its surface. The brightness over the entire galaxy is called apparent magnitude.

Table

The surface brightness is calculated via $S=m+2.5\log _{10}A$ . Where $S$ is surface brightness, $m$ is total magnitude, and $A$ is the total area in square arcseconds. Area is calculated using the formula for an ellipse; $\pi ab$ , where $a$ is the semi-major axis and $b$ is the semi-minor axis. Each axis is half of the dimension, because each dimension is the entire length/height but the axis is only the length/height to the centre, this combined with the symmetry of an ellipse means that half the dimension is the axis.

Combining this with the original formula we get: $S=m+2.5\log _{10}(\pi {\frac {a}{2}}{\frac {b}{2}})$ , which simplifies to $S=m+2.5\log _{10}{\frac {\pi ab}{4}}$ .


Galaxy	Surface Brightness(mag/arcsecond²)	Apparent Magnitude	Dimensions	Distance(Mly)	Type	Notes	Citations
Messier 82	20.91	8.4	9x4 arcminutes(540x240 arcseconds)	12	Spiral	Has rapid star formation due to interactions with M81 making red streaks.	^[1]^[2]
Messier 32	20.93	8.1	8x6 arcminutes(480x360 arcseconds)	2.5	Elliptical	Satellite galaxy of the Andromeda Galaxy	^[3]^[4]
NGC 3632	21.17	10.6	3x2 arcminutes(180x120 arcseconds)	70	Spiral		^[5]^[6]
Messier 81	21.33	6.9	21x10 arcminutes(1260x600 arcseconds)	11.6	Spiral	Faintest galaxy visible to the naked eye, despite the naked eye limiting magnitude of a star being fainter, surface brightness limits this for galaxies.^[7]	^[8]^[9]
Andromeda Galaxy	22.19	3.44	178x63 arcminutes(10680x3780 arcseconds)	2.54	Spiral/ring	It's core is significantly brighter than it's outer disk.^[10]	^[11]^[12]^[13]
Messier 87	22.45	9.6	7 arcminutes(138544.23 square arcseconds)	54	Elliptical	Roughly round, so $\pi r^{2}$ is used along with angular diameter.	^[14]^[15]
Messier 49	22.6	9.4	9x7.5 arcminutes(540x450 arcseconds)	60	Elliptical		^[16]^[17]
Triangulum Galaxy	23	5.7	70.8x41.7 arcminutes(4248x2502 arcseconds)	3	Spiral		^[18]^[19]