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Uncommon galaxy 22 EP

NGC 1516B

RA 62.0346° · Dec -8.8357° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
22 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Spiral galaxy +5
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 22

12 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Spiral galaxy · +5
  • 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.
  • Spiral. A spiral galaxy. Those arms are not solid structures but traffic jams — density waves that stars drift into and out of as they orbit.

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 15 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Eridanus.
  • Seen from everywhere. It sits almost on the celestial equator, so it can be seen from essentially anywhere on Earth.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around November — 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
Eri
dso type
G
hubble
Sc
mag
15
name
NGC 1516B
size arcmin
1.26

Nearby objects

About NGC 1516B

NGC 1516B is an uncommon galaxy. It sits in the constellation Eri and shines at apparent magnitude 15.

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 1516B in the constellation Eri. At apparent magnitude 15, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 1516B 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 1516B is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 1516B scores 22 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 12 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Galaxy, Spiral galaxy 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.