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Common galaxy 20 EP

NGC 1574

RA 65.4951° · Dec -56.9748° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 2 badges
20 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Galaxy +14
  • Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) +6
Total score 20

2 more points to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) · +6

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.
  • Lenticular. A lenticular galaxy: it has a disc like a spiral but has run out of the gas needed to make new stars, leaving the arms behind.

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 10.2 you'll want a small backyard telescope, over in Reticulum.
  • 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 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
Ret
dso type
G
hubble
E-S0
mag
10.24
name
NGC 1574
size arcmin
4.13
surface brightness
23.1

About NGC 1574

NGC 1574 is a common galaxy. It sits in the constellation Ret and shines at apparent magnitude 10.24.

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 1574 in the constellation Ret. At apparent magnitude 10.24, a small backyard telescope will bring it into view.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 1574 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 1574 is a common galaxy

NGC 1574 scores 20 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 2 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 2 science badges — Galaxy and Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) — 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.