About NGC 4236
NGC 4236 is an epic galaxy. It sits in the constellation Dra and shines at apparent magnitude 9.77.
A barred spiral — a straight bar of stars driving right through the nucleus, feeding gas inwards. Our own Milky Way is one of these.
Epic galaxy 53 EP
NGC 4236
RA 184.1755° · Dec 69.4626° · openngc
Score breakdown
· 6 badgesEpic 78 pts → Anomaly
- Galaxy +14
- Barred spiral galaxy +10
- Ghostly low surface brightness +10
- Coming towards us +10
- Big on the sky +5
- Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
Total score 53
25 more points to reach Anomaly.
Badges
- Galaxy · +14
- Barred spiral galaxy · +10
- Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
- Big on the sky · +5
- Ghostly low surface brightness · +10
- Coming towards us · +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
- 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 9.8 you'll want a small backyard telescope, 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
- hubble
- SBd
- mag
- 9.77
- name
- NGC 4236
- radial velocity kms
- -1
- size arcmin
- 23.5
- surface brightness
- 24.58
Nearby objects
How to see it
Look for NGC 4236 in the constellation Dra. At apparent magnitude 9.77, a small backyard telescope will bring it into view.
Like any astronomical target, NGC 4236 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 4236 is an epic galaxy
NGC 4236 scores 53 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 25 points would lift it into a rarer tier.
That score comes from 6 science badges — Galaxy, Barred spiral galaxy, Never sets (northern circumpolar), Big on the sky, Ghostly low surface brightness and Coming towards us — 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.