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Common galaxy 20 EP

IC 5235

RA 340.3561° · Dec -66.5803° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 2 badges
20 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Galaxy +14
  • Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) +6
Total score 20

2 more points to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) · +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.
  • Lenticular. A lenticular galaxy: it has a disc like a spiral but has run out of the gas needed to make new stars, leaving the arms behind.

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 12.4 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Tucana.
  • 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 August — 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
Tuc
dso type
G
hubble
S0-a
mag
12.38
name
IC 5235
size arcmin
0.63
surface brightness
20.03

Nearby objects

About IC 5235

IC 5235 is a common galaxy. It sits in the constellation Tuc and shines at apparent magnitude 12.38.

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 5235 in the constellation Tuc. At apparent magnitude 12.38, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, IC 5235 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 5235 is a common galaxy

IC 5235 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 Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) — 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.