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Uncommon galaxy 30 EP

NGC 3088A

RA 150.2800° · Dec 22.4032° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
30 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • On the zodiac +3
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 30

4 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy · +10
  • On the zodiac · +3
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) · +3

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

  • 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
Leo
dso type
G
hubble
SBab
mag
14.4
name
NGC 3088A
size arcmin
1.35
surface brightness
23.5

Nearby objects

About NGC 3088A

NGC 3088A is an uncommon galaxy. It sits in the constellation Leo and shines at apparent magnitude 14.4.

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 3088A in the constellation Leo. At apparent magnitude 14.4, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 3088A 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 3088A is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 3088A scores 30 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 4 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Galaxy, Barred spiral galaxy, On the zodiac 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.