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Uncommon galaxy 27 EP

IC 1987 NED03

RA 55.0502° · Dec -55.0534° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
27 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Ghostly low surface brightness +10
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 27

7 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • 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.

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 16.4 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Reticulum.
  • Southern sky. It rides the southern half of the sky — an easier target the further south you are.
  • 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
Ret
dso type
G
mag
16.39
name
IC 1987 NED03
size arcmin
0.79
surface brightness
25.27

Nearby objects

About IC 1987 NED03

IC 1987 NED03 is an uncommon galaxy. It sits in the constellation Ret and shines at apparent magnitude 16.39.

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 1987 NED03 in the constellation Ret. At apparent magnitude 16.39, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, IC 1987 NED03 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 1987 NED03 is an uncommon galaxy

IC 1987 NED03 scores 27 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 7 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Galaxy, 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.