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Rare galaxy 47 EP

NGC 185

RA 9.7415° · Dec 48.3374° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 6 badges
47 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Ghostly low surface brightness +10
  • Coming towards us +10
  • Big on the sky +5
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
Total score 47

3 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Elliptical galaxy · +4
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
  • Big on the sky · +5
  • Ghostly low surface brightness · +10
  • Coming towards us · +10

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 9.2 you'll want a small backyard telescope, over in Cassiopeia.
  • Northern sky. It rides the northern half of the sky — an easier target the further north you are.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around September — 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 New General Catalogue. Its NGC number comes from J. L. E. Dreyer's 1888 catalogue, itself built on decades of sky sweeps by William Herschel and his sister Caroline.

Properties

constellation
Cas
dso type
G
hubble
E
mag
9.2
name
NGC 185
radial velocity kms
-204
size arcmin
12.94
surface brightness
24.58

About NGC 185

NGC 185 is a rare galaxy. It sits in the constellation Cas and shines at apparent magnitude 9.2.

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 NGC 185 in the constellation Cas. At apparent magnitude 9.2, a small backyard telescope will bring it into view.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 185 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 NGC 185 is a rare galaxy

NGC 185 scores 47 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 3 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 6 science badges — Galaxy, Elliptical galaxy, Never sets (northern circumpolar), Big on the sky, Ghostly low surface brightness and Coming towards us — 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.