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Uncommon galaxy 28 EP

NGC 2276

RA 111.8098° · Dec 85.7546° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
28 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
Total score 28

6 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy · +10
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4

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 11.5 you'll want a small backyard telescope, over in Cepheus.
  • Never sets. So far north that from Britain, Canada or northern Europe it never dips below the horizon — it is up every clear night of the year.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around January — 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
Cep
dso type
G
hubble
SABc
mag
11.5
name
NGC 2276
size arcmin
2.23
surface brightness
22.26

About NGC 2276

NGC 2276 is an uncommon galaxy. It sits in the constellation Cep and shines at apparent magnitude 11.5.

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 NGC 2276 in the constellation Cep. At apparent magnitude 11.5, a small backyard telescope will bring it into view.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 2276 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 2276 is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 2276 scores 28 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 6 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Galaxy, Barred spiral galaxy and Never sets (northern circumpolar) — 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.