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Rare galaxy 36 EP

IC 937

RA 206.1205° · Dec 55.6302° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
36 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Ghostly low surface brightness +10
  • Spiral galaxy +5
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 36

14 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Spiral galaxy · +5
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
  • Ghostly low surface brightness · +10
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) · +3

Trivia

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.
  • Spiral. A spiral galaxy. Those arms are not solid structures but traffic jams — density waves that stars drift into and out of as they orbit.

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 17.5 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Ursa Major.
  • Northern sky. It rides the northern half of the sky — an easier target the further north you are.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around April — 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
UMa
dso type
G
hubble
Sab
mag
17.5
name
IC 937
size arcmin
0.52
surface brightness
24.75

Nearby objects

About IC 937

IC 937 is a rare galaxy. It sits in the constellation UMa and shines at apparent magnitude 17.5.

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.

How to see it

Look for IC 937 in the constellation UMa. At apparent magnitude 17.5, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, IC 937 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 937 is a rare galaxy

IC 937 scores 36 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 14 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Galaxy, Spiral galaxy, Never sets (northern circumpolar), Ghostly low surface brightness and Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) — 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.