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Rare galaxy 36 EP

Polarissima Australis

RA 25.4055° · Dec -89.3345° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
36 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Has a proper name +8
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • Spiral galaxy +5
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 36

14 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • Has a proper name · +8
  • 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

  • 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 13.5 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Octans.
  • Southern sky only. So far south it never rises for most of the northern hemisphere. To see it you'd have to travel to Chile, South Africa or Australia.
  • 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
Oct
dist ly
114750768.5531
dso type
G
hubble
Sc
mag
13.53
name
Polarissima Australis
named
yes
radial velocity kms
2453
redshift
0.0082
size arcmin
1.92
surface brightness
23.47

About Polarissima Australis

Polarissima Australis is a rare galaxy. It lies about 114,750,768.6 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Oct and shines at apparent magnitude 13.53.

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 Polarissima Australis in the constellation Oct. At apparent magnitude 13.53, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, Polarissima Australis 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 Polarissima Australis is a rare galaxy

Polarissima Australis scores 36 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 14 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Galaxy, Outside our galaxy entirely, Has a proper name, 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.