← Back to dex
Uncommon galaxy 31 EP

NGC 3010

RA 147.6381° · Dec 44.3144° · openngc

Loading sky survey…
🌌 View in 3D star map
Tonight’s visibility

Computing the sky for your location…

Score breakdown

· 5 badges
31 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 31

3 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • Elliptical galaxy · +4
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +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

  • 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 16.2 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Ursa Major.
  • 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.

Could we get there?

  • Verdict. Impossible with our current technology — and the next millennium of it.

Properties

constellation
UMa
dist ly
220282363.9784
dso type
G
hubble
E
mag
16.23
name
NGC 3010
radial velocity kms
4690
redshift
0.0158
size arcmin
0.98
surface brightness
23.79

About NGC 3010

NGC 3010 is an uncommon galaxy. It lies about 220,282,364 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation UMa and shines at apparent magnitude 16.23.

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 3010 in the constellation UMa. At apparent magnitude 16.23, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 3010 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 3010 is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 3010 scores 31 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 3 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Galaxy, Outside our galaxy entirely, Elliptical galaxy, Never sets (northern circumpolar) 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.