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Common galaxy 21 EP

IC 5049A

RA 311.8468° · Dec -38.4132° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
21 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Galaxy +14
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 21

1 more point to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Elliptical galaxy · +4
  • 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.
  • Elliptical. An elliptical galaxy: a smooth swarm of stars on randomly tilted orbits, with almost no cold gas left to build anything new.

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 15.2 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Microscopium.
  • 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 August — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Red and dead. Ellipticals glow reddish because every short-lived blue star they ever had has already died. Astronomers call them 'red and dead'.

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
Mic
dso type
G
hubble
E
mag
15.15
name
IC 5049A
size arcmin
1.1
surface brightness
24.21

About IC 5049A

IC 5049A is a common galaxy. It sits in the constellation Mic and shines at apparent magnitude 15.15.

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 5049A in the constellation Mic. At apparent magnitude 15.15, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, IC 5049A 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 5049A is a common galaxy

IC 5049A scores 21 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 1 point would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Galaxy, Elliptical galaxy 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.