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Uncommon galaxy 30 EP

IC 2891

RA 172.7006° · Dec 12.6777° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
30 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • On the zodiac +3
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 30

4 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy · +10
  • On the zodiac · +3
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) · +3

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 16.6 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Leo.
  • 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 March — 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
Leo
dso type
G
hubble
SBbc
mag
16.65
name
IC 2891
size arcmin
0.46
surface brightness
23.52

Nearby objects

About IC 2891

IC 2891 is an uncommon galaxy. It sits in the constellation Leo and shines at apparent magnitude 16.65.

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 IC 2891 in the constellation Leo. At apparent magnitude 16.65, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, IC 2891 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 2891 is an uncommon galaxy

IC 2891 scores 30 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 4 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Galaxy, Barred spiral 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.