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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2017
Until recently is was commonly thought that most spiral galaxies were transparent or contained only modest amounts of absorbing dust, making them optically thin in the B-band (Holmberg 1958). However Disney et al. (1989) showed that there was very little evidence for this. Using a very large optical database Valentijn (1990) showed that surface brightness in B is almost independent of inclination, implying that spiral galaxies in general are optically thick in B.