Rare galaxy 40 EP

NGC 221

RA 10.6743° · Dec 40.8653° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges

40 pts · Rare

Rare 50 pts → Epic

Galaxy +14
Messier object +12
Coming towards us +10
Elliptical galaxy +4

Total score 40

10 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

Galaxy · +14
Messier object · +12
Elliptical galaxy · +4
Coming towards us · +10

Trivia

Hard to believe

Messier object. One of the 110 showpieces of the Messier list — catalogued as M32.

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 8.1 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: 8.13
messier: yes
messier number: 032
name: NGC 221
radial velocity kms: -199
size arcmin: 7.74
surface brightness: 22.17

Nearby objects

About NGC 221

NGC 221 is a rare galaxy. It sits in the constellation And and shines at apparent magnitude 8.13.

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 221 in the constellation And. At apparent magnitude 8.13, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 221 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 221 is a rare galaxy

NGC 221 scores 40 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 10 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Galaxy, Messier object, Elliptical galaxy 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.