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Common galaxy 21 EP

NGC 3747

RA 173.1294° · Dec 74.3784° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
21 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Galaxy +14
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 21

1 more point to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • 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.

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 16.3 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Draco.
  • Never sets. So far north that from Britain, Canada or northern Europe it never dips below the horizon — it is up every clear night of the year.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around March — 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
Dra
dso type
G
mag
16.33
name
NGC 3747
size arcmin
0.48
surface brightness
23.32

About NGC 3747

NGC 3747 is a common galaxy. It sits in the constellation Dra and shines at apparent magnitude 16.33.

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 3747 in the constellation Dra. At apparent magnitude 16.33, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 3747 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 3747 is a common galaxy

NGC 3747 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, 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.