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Rare galaxy 45 EP

IC 3687

RA 190.5629° · Dec 38.5033° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
45 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Irregular galaxy (no shape at all) +12
  • Ghostly low surface brightness +10
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 45

5 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • Irregular galaxy (no shape at all) · +12
  • Ghostly low surface brightness · +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.
  • Irregular. An irregular galaxy — no disc, no bulge, no symmetry. Most have been pulled out of shape by a larger neighbour's gravity.

Sense of scale

  • In perspective. Further than Andromeda, the most distant thing the unaided human eye can see.
  • 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 13.3 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Canes Venatici.
  • 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 April — that's when to go looking.

Could we get there?

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

Properties

constellation
CVn
dist ly
16720227.6273
dso type
G
hubble
IAB
mag
13.35
name
IC 3687
radial velocity kms
359
redshift
0.0012
size arcmin
3.34
surface brightness
25.04

About IC 3687

IC 3687 is a rare galaxy. It lies about 16,720,227.6 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation CVn and shines at apparent magnitude 13.35.

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 3687 in the constellation CVn. At apparent magnitude 13.35, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, IC 3687 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 3687 is a rare galaxy

IC 3687 scores 45 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 5 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Galaxy, Outside our galaxy entirely, Irregular galaxy (no shape at all), Ghostly low surface brightness 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.