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Epic cluster 51 EP

NGC 3114

RA 150.6232° · Dec -60.1305° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 7 badges
51 pts · Epic
Epic 78 pts → Anomaly
  • Bright enough for the unaided eye +14
  • Coming towards us +10
  • Star cluster +7
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) +6
  • Bright deep-sky object +6
  • Big on the sky +5
  • Open cluster +3
Total score 51

27 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

  • Star cluster · +7
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) · +6
  • Bright deep-sky object · +6
  • Open cluster · +3
  • Big on the sky · +5
  • Coming towards us · +10
  • Bright enough for the unaided eye · +14

Trivia

What it actually is

  • What it actually is. An open cluster: a few hundred stars born together out of one collapsing cloud, still drifting along in loose formation.

Sense of scale

  • In perspective. Far away by human standards, yet still a local address inside the Milky Way's spiral arms.
  • Sense of scale. Gravity is not strong enough to hold it. Within a few hundred million years these siblings will be scattered right around the galaxy.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 4.2 you can see it with your own eyes from a dark site, over in Carina.
  • 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 February — that's when to go looking.

Could we get there?

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

Getting there

  • Aboard Voyager 1. ≈ 60.1 million years at Voyager 1's speed (17 km/s).

Properties

constellation
Car
dist ly
3418.826
dso type
OCl
mag
4.2
name
NGC 3114
radial velocity kms
-4
size arcmin
12.3

About NGC 3114

NGC 3114 is an epic cluster. It lies about 3,418.8 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Car and shines at apparent magnitude 4.2.

An open cluster: a few hundred stars born together out of one collapsing cloud, still drifting along in loose formation.

How to see it

Look for NGC 3114 in the constellation Car. At apparent magnitude 4.2, it can be glimpsed with the unaided eye under dark skies.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 3114 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 3114 is an epic cluster

NGC 3114 scores 51 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 27 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 7 science badges — Star cluster, Distant (over 1,000 light-years), Bright deep-sky object, Open cluster, Big on the sky, Coming towards us and Bright enough for the unaided eye — 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.