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Rare galaxy 38 EP

Antennae Galaxies

RA 180.4709° · Dec -18.8676° · openngc

Real photograph of Antennae Galaxies 📷 Real photo
ESA/Hubble & NASA (CC BY 4.0)
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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
38 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • Has a proper name +8
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
Total score 38

12 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • Has a proper name · +8
  • Barred spiral galaxy · +10

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

  • 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 10.2 you'll want a small backyard telescope, over in Corvus.
  • 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 March — that's when to go looking.

Could we get there?

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

Properties

constellation
Crv
dist ly
78125508.0362
dso type
G
hubble
SBm
mag
10.2
name
Antennae Galaxies
named
yes
radial velocity kms
1672
redshift
0.0056
size arcmin
5.42
surface brightness
22.94

About Antennae Galaxies

Antennae Galaxies is a rare galaxy. It lies about 78,125,508 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Crv and shines at apparent magnitude 10.2.

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 Antennae Galaxies in the constellation Crv. At apparent magnitude 10.2, a small backyard telescope will bring it into view.

Like any astronomical target, Antennae Galaxies 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 Antennae Galaxies is a rare galaxy

Antennae Galaxies scores 38 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 12 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Galaxy, Outside our galaxy entirely, Has a proper name and Barred spiral galaxy — 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.