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Rare galaxy 41 EP

Coddington's Nebula

RA 157.0978° · Dec 68.4121° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
41 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • Has a proper name +8
  • Big on the sky +5
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
Total score 41

9 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Has a proper name · +8
  • Barred spiral galaxy · +10
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
  • Big on the sky · +5

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 10.5 you'll want a small backyard telescope, over in Ursa Major.
  • 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 February — 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.

What's in a name

  • Named. Notable enough to have earned a proper name, not just a catalogue number.

Properties

constellation
UMa
dso type
G
hubble
SABm
mag
10.46
name
Coddington's Nebula
named
yes
radial velocity kms
48
redshift
0.0002
size arcmin
12.91
surface brightness
24.38

About Coddington's Nebula

Coddington's Nebula is a rare galaxy. It sits in the constellation UMa and shines at apparent magnitude 10.46.

A barred spiral — a straight bar of stars driving right through the nucleus, feeding gas inwards. Our own Milky Way is one of these.

How to see it

Look for Coddington's Nebula in the constellation UMa. At apparent magnitude 10.46, a small backyard telescope will bring it into view.

Like any astronomical target, Coddington's Nebula 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 Coddington's Nebula is a rare galaxy

Coddington's Nebula scores 41 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 9 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Galaxy, Has a proper name, Barred spiral galaxy, Never sets (northern circumpolar) and Big on the sky — 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.