About IC 1641
IC 1641 is a trash cluster. It sits in the constellation Tuc and shines at apparent magnitude 14.99.
An open cluster: a few hundred stars born together out of one collapsing cloud, still drifting along in loose formation.
Trash cluster 13 EP
IC 1641
RA 17.4133° · Dec -71.7690° · openngc
Score breakdown
· 3 badgesTrash 15 pts → Common
- Star cluster +7
- Open cluster +3
- Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 13
2 more points to reach Common.
Badges
- Star cluster · +7
- Open cluster · +3
- Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) · +3
Trivia
What it actually is
- What it actually is. An open cluster: a few hundred stars born together out of one collapsing cloud, still drifting along in loose formation.
Sense of scale
- Sense of scale. Gravity is not strong enough to hold it. Within a few hundred million years these siblings will be scattered right around the galaxy.
Find it in the sky
- How to spot it. At magnitude 15 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Tucana.
- Southern sky only. So far south it never rises for most of the northern hemisphere. To see it you'd have to travel to Chile, South Africa or Australia.
- Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around October — that's when to go looking.
Its true colour
- Its true colour. Open clusters look blue-white because they are young — their hottest, bluest stars have not had time to die yet.
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
- Tuc
- dso type
- OCl
- mag
- 14.99
- name
- IC 1641
- size arcmin
- 0.75
How to see it
Look for IC 1641 in the constellation Tuc. At apparent magnitude 14.99, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.
Like any astronomical target, IC 1641 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 1641 is a trash cluster
IC 1641 scores 13 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the trash tier. Another 2 points would lift it into a rarer tier.
That score comes from 3 science badges — Star cluster, Open cluster 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.