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Common galaxy 17 EP

IC 3389

RA 187.0980° · Dec 27.8449° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 2 badges
17 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Galaxy +14
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 17

5 more points to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • 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 18.1 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Coma Berenices.
  • 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
Com
dso type
G
mag
18.11
name
IC 3389
size arcmin
0.33
surface brightness
24.42

Nearby objects

About IC 3389

IC 3389 is a common galaxy. It sits in the constellation Com and shines at apparent magnitude 18.11.

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 3389 in the constellation Com. At apparent magnitude 18.11, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, IC 3389 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 3389 is a common galaxy

IC 3389 scores 17 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 5 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 2 science badges — Galaxy 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.