About IC 342
IC 342 is a rare galaxy. It sits in the constellation Cam and shines at apparent magnitude 9.68.
A barred spiral — a straight bar of stars driving right through the nucleus, feeding gas inwards. Our own Milky Way is one of these.
Rare galaxy 43 EP
IC 342
RA 56.7021° · Dec 68.0964° · openngc
Score breakdown
· 5 badgesRare 50 pts → Epic
- Galaxy +14
- Barred spiral galaxy +10
- Ghostly low surface brightness +10
- Big on the sky +5
- Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
Total score 43
7 more points to reach Epic.
Badges
- Galaxy · +14
- Barred spiral galaxy · +10
- Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
- Big on the sky · +5
- Ghostly low surface brightness · +10
Trivia
What makes it special
- Barred spiral. A barred spiral — a straight bar of stars driving right through the nucleus, feeding gas inwards. Our own Milky Way is one of these.
What it actually is
- What it actually is. A galaxy: a gravitationally bound city of stars, gas and dark matter, turning so slowly that a single rotation takes hundreds of millions of years.
Sense of scale
- Scale. Home to hundreds of billions of stars — a universe unto itself, and every one of those points of light could have planets.
Find it in the sky
- How to spot it. At magnitude 9.7 you'll want a small backyard telescope, over in Camelopardalis.
- Never sets. So far north that from Britain, Canada or northern Europe it never dips below the horizon — it is up every clear night of the year.
- Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around November — that's when to go looking.
Its true colour
- Its true colour. Its colour is a census: blue where gas is still collapsing into hot young stars, yellow-red in the old, settled core.
How we came to know it
- The Index Catalogue. The IC was the 1895 and 1908 supplement to the NGC — the first catalogue in history to be filled largely with objects found on photographic plates rather than by eye.
Properties
- constellation
- Cam
- dso type
- G
- hubble
- SABc
- mag
- 9.68
- name
- IC 342
- radial velocity kms
- 23
- redshift
- 0.0001
- size arcmin
- 19.77
- surface brightness
- 24.85
How to see it
Look for IC 342 in the constellation Cam. At apparent magnitude 9.68, a small backyard telescope will bring it into view.
Like any astronomical target, IC 342 is best seen from a dark site away from city lights, and when it is above the horizon depends on your latitude and the time of year. The visibility panel above works out tonight's viewing window for your saved location.
Why IC 342 is a rare galaxy
IC 342 scores 43 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 7 points would lift it into a rarer tier.
That score comes from 5 science badges — Galaxy, Barred spiral galaxy, Never sets (northern circumpolar), Big on the sky and Ghostly low surface brightness — each earned for a real, measurable property of the object. Rarity on Spacedle is never random: the more remarkable an object's astrophysics, the more badges it collects, the higher it scores, and the rarer it ranks.