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Rare galaxy 45 EP

NGC 205

RA 10.0920° · Dec 41.6853° · openngc

Real photograph of NGC 205 📷 Real photo
European Space Agency (CC BY 2.0)
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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
45 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Messier object +12
  • Coming towards us +10
  • Big on the sky +5
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
Total score 45

5 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Messier object · +12
  • Elliptical galaxy · +4
  • Big on the sky · +5
  • Coming towards us · +10

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • Messier object. One of the 110 showpieces of the Messier list — catalogued as M110.

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 8.2 it is just past naked-eye reach — ordinary binoculars will pull it in, over in Andromeda.
  • 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'.

Properties

constellation
And
dso type
G
hubble
E
mag
8.15
messier
yes
messier number
110
name
NGC 205
radial velocity kms
-246
size arcmin
16.22
surface brightness
23.78

Nearby objects

About NGC 205

NGC 205 is a rare galaxy. It sits in the constellation And and shines at apparent magnitude 8.15.

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 NGC 205 in the constellation And. At apparent magnitude 8.15, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 205 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 205 is a rare galaxy

NGC 205 scores 45 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 5 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Galaxy, Messier object, Elliptical galaxy, Big on the sky 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.