← Back to dex
Common galaxy 20 EP

IC 4813

RA 286.4238° · Dec -66.5221° · openngc

Loading sky survey…
🌌 View in 3D star map
Tonight’s visibility

Computing the sky for your location…

Score breakdown

· 2 badges
20 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Galaxy +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
Total score 20

2 more points to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6

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

  • In perspective. Deep in the extragalactic distance — further than the entire Virgo Cluster of galaxies.
  • 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 12.6 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in 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.

Could we get there?

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

Getting there

  • Aboard Voyager 1. ≈ 3.6 trillion years at Voyager 1's speed (17 km/s).

Properties

constellation
Pav
dist ly
205056759.8734
dso type
G
mag
12.57
name
IC 4813
radial velocity kms
4369
redshift
0.0147
size arcmin
1.31
surface brightness
23.8

About IC 4813

IC 4813 is a common galaxy. It lies about 205,056,759.9 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Pav and shines at apparent magnitude 12.57.

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 4813 in the constellation Pav. At apparent magnitude 12.57, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, IC 4813 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 4813 is a common galaxy

IC 4813 scores 20 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 2 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 2 science badges — Galaxy and Outside our galaxy entirely — 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.