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Rare galaxy 39 EP

NGC 3280C

RA 158.1898° · Dec -12.6372° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
39 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Ghostly low surface brightness +10
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) +6
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 39

11 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) · +6
  • Ghostly low surface brightness · +10
  • 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.
  • Lenticular. A lenticular galaxy: it has a disc like a spiral but has run out of the gas needed to make new stars, leaving the arms behind.

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 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Hydra.
  • Southern sky. It rides the southern half of the sky — an easier target the further south 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
Hya
dist ly
399776871.0883
dso type
G
hubble
E-S0
mag
16.02
name
NGC 3280C
radial velocity kms
8456
redshift
0.0286
size arcmin
1.23
surface brightness
24.62

About NGC 3280C

NGC 3280C is a rare galaxy. It lies about 399,776,871.1 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Hya and shines at apparent magnitude 16.02.

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 3280C in the constellation Hya. At apparent magnitude 16.02, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 3280C 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 3280C is a rare galaxy

NGC 3280C scores 39 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 11 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Galaxy, Outside our galaxy entirely, Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms), Ghostly low surface brightness 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.