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Rare galaxy 40 EP

NGC 904

RA 36.0232° · Dec 27.3424° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 6 badges
40 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Ghostly low surface brightness +10
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
  • On the zodiac +3
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 40

10 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • Elliptical galaxy · +4
  • On the zodiac · +3
  • 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.
  • 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

  • In perspective. Deep in the extragalactic distance — further than the entire Virgo Cluster of galaxies.
  • 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 15 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Aries.
  • 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 October — that's when to go looking.

Could we get there?

  • Verdict. Impossible with our current technology — and the next millennium of it.

Properties

constellation
Ari
dist ly
250817382.8533
dso type
G
hubble
E
mag
14.98
name
NGC 904
radial velocity kms
5335
redshift
0.018
size arcmin
1.45
surface brightness
24.54

About NGC 904

NGC 904 is a rare galaxy. It lies about 250,817,382.9 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Ari and shines at apparent magnitude 14.98.

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 904 in the constellation Ari. At apparent magnitude 14.98, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 904 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 904 is a rare galaxy

NGC 904 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 6 science badges — Galaxy, Outside our galaxy entirely, Elliptical galaxy, On the zodiac, 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.