Talk:List of spiral galaxies

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Distance removal

I removed the columns with the distances for several reasons:

• Many of the numbers were unreferenced.
• Many of the referenced numbers came from bogus references, including amateur astronomy websites. In particular, the seds.org website is unreliable.
• Extragalactic distances are very uncertain; they are difficult to measure or to calculate with precision. Even the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database has problems. For example, compare their measurement for the distance to the Sombrero Galaxy with what astronomers have measured (as can be found in the references in the Wikipedia article on the Sombrero Galaxy).
• Formal distances have not been measured to most spiral galaxies. As noted in the example with the Sombrero Galaxy, applying the Hubble law is tricky (given the presence of the Virgo Cluster), so calculations of the distance based on redshift are inappropriate.

Please do not add distances back to this article. At the very least, discuss the situation with me before doing so. Dr. Submillimeter 21:54, 4 January 2007 (UTC)