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Uncommon galaxy 24 EP

IC 2878

RA 172.4092° · Dec 9.9676° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
24 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
  • On the zodiac +3
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 24

10 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Elliptical galaxy · +4
  • On the zodiac · +3
  • 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.
  • Elliptical. An elliptical galaxy: a smooth swarm of stars on randomly tilted orbits, with almost no cold gas left to build anything new.

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 16.5 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Leo.
  • Seen from everywhere. It sits almost on the celestial equator, so it can be seen from essentially anywhere on Earth.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around March — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Red and dead. Ellipticals glow reddish because every short-lived blue star they ever had has already died. Astronomers call them 'red and dead'.

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
Leo
dso type
G
hubble
E
mag
16.54
name
IC 2878
size arcmin
0.53
surface brightness
24.01

Nearby objects

About IC 2878

IC 2878 is an uncommon galaxy. It sits in the constellation Leo and shines at apparent magnitude 16.54.

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 2878 in the constellation Leo. At apparent magnitude 16.54, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, IC 2878 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 2878 is an uncommon galaxy

IC 2878 scores 24 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 10 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Galaxy, Elliptical galaxy, On the zodiac 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.