About IC 4746
IC 4746 is a trash galaxy. It sits in the constellation Pav.
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.
Trash galaxy 14 EP
IC 4746
RA 281.4771° · Dec -72.6682° · openngc
Score breakdown
· 1 badgeTrash 15 pts → Common
- Galaxy +14
Total score 14
1 more point to reach Common.
Badges
- Galaxy · +14
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
- Where to look. You'll find it in the constellation Pavo.
- Southern sky only. So far south it never rises for most of the northern hemisphere. To see it you'd have to travel to Chile, South Africa or Australia.
- Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around July — 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
- Pav
- dso type
- G
- name
- IC 4746
- size arcmin
- 0.57
How to see it
Look for IC 4746 in the constellation Pav.
Like any astronomical target, IC 4746 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 4746 is a trash galaxy
IC 4746 scores 14 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the trash tier. Another 1 point would lift it into a rarer tier.
That score comes from 1 science badge — Galaxy — 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.