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Common galaxy 21 EP

NGC 2829 NED01

RA 139.8763° · Dec 33.6485° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
21 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Galaxy +14
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 21

1 more point to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Elliptical galaxy · +4
  • 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

  • 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 16.7 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Lynx.
  • 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 February — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Red and dead. Ellipticals glow reddish because every short-lived blue star they ever had has already died. Astronomers call them 'red and dead'.

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
Lyn
dso type
G
hubble
E
mag
16.67
name
NGC 2829 NED01
size arcmin
0.48
surface brightness
23.98

About NGC 2829 NED01

NGC 2829 NED01 is a common galaxy. It sits in the constellation Lyn and shines at apparent magnitude 16.67.

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 2829 NED01 in the constellation Lyn. At apparent magnitude 16.67, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 2829 NED01 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 2829 NED01 is a common galaxy

NGC 2829 NED01 scores 21 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 1 point would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Galaxy, Elliptical 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.