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Uncommon galaxy 27 EP

NGC 247A

RA 11.8673° · Dec -20.3976° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
27 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Ghostly low surface brightness +10
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 27

7 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Ghostly low surface brightness · +10
  • 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.

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 17.2 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Cetus.
  • 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 October — 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 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
Cet
dso type
G
mag
17.22
name
NGC 247A
size arcmin
0.52
surface brightness
24.56

About NGC 247A

NGC 247A is an uncommon galaxy. It sits in the constellation Cet and shines at apparent magnitude 17.22.

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 247A in the constellation Cet. At apparent magnitude 17.22, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 247A 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 247A is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 247A scores 27 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 7 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Galaxy, Ghostly low surface brightness 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.