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Rare galaxy 34 EP

IC 3445

RA 187.8310° · Dec 12.7380° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
34 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Coming towards us +10
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
  • On the zodiac +3
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 34

16 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Elliptical galaxy · +4
  • On the zodiac · +3
  • Coming towards us · +10
  • 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 15.9 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Virgo.
  • 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

  • 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
Vir
dso type
G
hubble
E
mag
15.95
name
IC 3445
radial velocity kms
-351
size arcmin
0.47
surface brightness
23.73

Nearby objects

About IC 3445

IC 3445 is a rare galaxy. It sits in the constellation Vir and shines at apparent magnitude 15.95.

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 3445 in the constellation Vir. At apparent magnitude 15.95, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, IC 3445 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 3445 is a rare galaxy

IC 3445 scores 34 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 16 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Galaxy, Elliptical galaxy, On the zodiac, Coming towards us 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.