← Back to dex
Rare galaxy 36 EP

IC 2900

RA 172.8737° · Dec 13.1673° · openngc

Loading sky survey…
🌌 View in 3D star map
Tonight’s visibility

Computing the sky for your location…

Score breakdown

· 5 badges
36 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • On the zodiac +3
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 36

14 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • 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

  • In perspective. Deep in the extragalactic distance — further than the entire Virgo Cluster of galaxies.
  • 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 17.3 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.

Could we get there?

  • Verdict. Impossible with our current technology — and the next millennium of it.

Properties

constellation
Leo
dist ly
1173628676.06
dso type
G
hubble
SBbc
mag
17.3
name
IC 2900
radial velocity kms
24134
redshift
0.084
size arcmin
0.33
surface brightness
23.47

About IC 2900

IC 2900 is a rare galaxy. It lies about 1.17×10^9 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Leo and shines at apparent magnitude 17.3.

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 2900 in the constellation Leo. At apparent magnitude 17.3, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, IC 2900 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 2900 is a rare galaxy

IC 2900 scores 36 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 14 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Galaxy, Outside our galaxy entirely, 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.