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Anomaly galaxy 94 EP

Small Magellanic Cloud

RA 13.1866° · Dec -72.8286° · openngc

Real photograph of Small Magellanic Cloud 📷 Real photo
ESA/Hubble and Digitized Sky Survey 2 (CC BY 4.0)
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Score breakdown

· 7 badges
94 pts · Anomaly
Anomaly 120 pts → Mythic
  • A Magellanic Cloud (our satellite galaxy) +30
  • Galaxy +14
  • Bright enough for the unaided eye +14
  • Bigger on the sky than the full Moon +12
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • Has a proper name +8
  • Bright deep-sky object +6
Total score 94

26 more points to reach Mythic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Bright deep-sky object · +6
  • Has a proper name · +8
  • Barred spiral galaxy · +10
  • Bigger on the sky than the full Moon · +12
  • Bright enough for the unaided eye · +14
  • A Magellanic Cloud (our satellite galaxy) · +30

Trivia

What makes it special

  • Barred spiral. A barred spiral — a straight bar of stars driving right through the nucleus, feeding gas inwards. Our own Milky Way is one of these.

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 2.3 you can see it with your own eyes from a dark site, 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 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.

What's in a name

  • Named. Notable enough to have earned a proper name, not just a catalogue number.

Properties

constellation
Tuc
dso type
G
hubble
SBm
mag
2.3
name
Small Magellanic Cloud
named
yes
radial velocity kms
146
redshift
0.0005
size arcmin
299.92
surface brightness
23.42

Nearby objects

About Small Magellanic Cloud

Small Magellanic Cloud is an anomaly galaxy. It sits in the constellation Tuc and shines at apparent magnitude 2.3.

A barred spiral — a straight bar of stars driving right through the nucleus, feeding gas inwards. Our own Milky Way is one of these.

How to see it

Look for Small Magellanic Cloud in the constellation Tuc. At apparent magnitude 2.3, it can be glimpsed with the unaided eye under dark skies.

Like any astronomical target, Small Magellanic Cloud 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 Small Magellanic Cloud is an anomaly galaxy

Small Magellanic Cloud scores 94 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the anomaly tier. Another 26 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 7 science badges — Galaxy, Bright deep-sky object, Has a proper name, Barred spiral galaxy, Bigger on the sky than the full Moon, Bright enough for the unaided eye and A Magellanic Cloud (our satellite galaxy) — 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.