If I remember correctly there was a black and white photo of NGC 1300 on one of the feweth pages of the "Kis Égi Kalauz", a little sky map I got as a child. This photo played a significant role in keeping up my interest in astronomy and that I later became a deep-sky observer. That time around the age of 11-12 I didn't really have a chance to take a look at this galaxy. I pointed the big Dobsonian at Ágasvár towards NGC 1300 many years later on the 2012 November new moon weekend under a little misty, not perfect sky.

The magnitude 11.4 galaxy seems to be surprisingly faint. Only the central part is brighter which holds an almost stellar core. The central region gets very suddenly fainter symmetrically going away from the core. The bar is spectacular, though it's fainter than the center. There are two brighter, irregular regions at both ends of the bar. This is characteristic of such barred spirals. One more small brighter spot can be seen in the bar east of the core. The arms are very faint, especially the south arm. The north arm is a little brighter and it visibly extends beyond the bar. Then it softly vanishes in the background.

Comparison with the photograph

The photo on the left, courtesy of Don Goldman was made using a 14.5" telescope. Don's original photograph has been cropped and my inverted drawing rotated to show a similar area of the sky.

By comparing the photograph and the drawing it is obvious that I saw only the brighter inner part of the galaxy, although the limiting magnitude of the drawing is not that bad (it is worth comparing the stars). The north arm (the upper inner arm on Don Goldman's photo) gets a little messed up where it turns faint. This is probably what I could see as the arm extending beyond the bar.

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image of the inner parts of NGC 1300 can be seen below. Visually it is probably impossible to see it in such detail with any kind of telescope.