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Rare galaxy 37 EP

NGC 1066

RA 40.9581° · Dec 32.4750° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
37 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Ghostly low surface brightness +10
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 37

13 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • Elliptical galaxy · +4
  • 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 14.8 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Triangulum.
  • 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
Tri
dist ly
204917075.432
dso type
G
hubble
E
mag
14.79
name
NGC 1066
radial velocity kms
4367
redshift
0.0147
size arcmin
1.82
surface brightness
24.73

About NGC 1066

NGC 1066 is a rare galaxy. It lies about 204,917,075.4 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Tri and shines at apparent magnitude 14.79.

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 1066 in the constellation Tri. At apparent magnitude 14.79, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 1066 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 1066 is a rare galaxy

NGC 1066 scores 37 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 13 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Galaxy, Outside our galaxy entirely, Elliptical 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.