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Rare galaxy 37 EP

IC 3969 NED01

RA 194.8863° · Dec 19.6531° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
37 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • Ghostly low surface brightness +10
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 37

13 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy · +10
  • Ghostly low surface brightness · +10
  • 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 17.2 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 April — 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
hubble
SBb
mag
17.21
name
IC 3969 NED01
size arcmin
0.69
surface brightness
24.75

Nearby objects

About IC 3969 NED01

IC 3969 NED01 is a rare galaxy. It sits in the constellation Com and shines at apparent magnitude 17.21.

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 3969 NED01 in the constellation Com. At apparent magnitude 17.21, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, IC 3969 NED01 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 3969 NED01 is a rare galaxy

IC 3969 NED01 scores 37 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 13 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

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