Epic cluster 76 EP

Small Sgr Star Cloud

RA 274.2338° · Dec -18.5146° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 9 badges

76 pts · Epic

Epic 78 pts → Anomaly

Bright enough for the unaided eye +14
Messier object +12
Bigger on the sky than the full Moon +12
Has a proper name +8
Toward the galactic centre +8
Star cluster +7
Bright deep-sky object +6
Loose stellar association +6
On the zodiac +3

Total score 76

2 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

Star cluster · +7
Messier object · +12
Bright deep-sky object · +6
Has a proper name · +8
Loose stellar association · +6
Toward the galactic centre · +8
On the zodiac · +3
Bigger on the sky than the full Moon · +12
Bright enough for the unaided eye · +14

Trivia

Hard to believe

Messier object. One of the 110 showpieces of the Messier list — catalogued as M24.

What it actually is

What it actually is. A stellar association: a sprawling family of hot young stars that shared a birthplace but were never gravitationally bound to each other.

Sense of scale

Sense of scale. It is already coming apart. Associations dissolve into the general population of the galaxy within tens of millions of years.

Find it in the sky

How to spot it. At magnitude 4.5 you can see it with your own eyes from a dark site, over in Sagittarius.
Southern sky. It rides the southern half of the sky — an easier target the further south you are.
Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around June — that's when to go looking.

What's in a name

Named. Notable enough to have earned a proper name, not just a catalogue number.

How we came to know it

Messier's anti-list. Charles Messier was a comet hunter, and he compiled his famous catalogue in the 1770s and 80s purely as a list of fuzzy things that are NOT comets. History remembers the distractions and forgets the comets.

Properties

constellation: Sgr
dso type: *Ass
mag: 4.5
messier: yes
messier number: 024
name: Small Sgr Star Cloud
named: yes
size arcmin: 120

Nearby objects

About Small Sgr Star Cloud

Small Sgr Star Cloud is an epic cluster. It sits in the constellation Sgr and shines at apparent magnitude 4.5.

A stellar association: a sprawling family of hot young stars that shared a birthplace but were never gravitationally bound to each other.

How to see it

Look for Small Sgr Star Cloud in the constellation Sgr. At apparent magnitude 4.5, it can be glimpsed with the unaided eye under dark skies.

Like any astronomical target, Small Sgr Star Cloud 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 Small Sgr Star Cloud is an epic cluster

Small Sgr Star Cloud scores 76 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 2 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 9 science badges — Star cluster, Messier object, Bright deep-sky object, Has a proper name, Loose stellar association, Toward the galactic centre, On the zodiac and Bigger on the sky than the full Moon — 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.