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Rare galaxy 35 EP

NGC 4335

RA 185.7578° · Dec 58.4446° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
35 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Coming towards us +10
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 35

15 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Elliptical galaxy · +4
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
  • Coming towards us · +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.
  • Elliptical. An elliptical galaxy: a smooth swarm of stars on randomly tilted orbits, with almost no cold gas left to build anything new.

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 13.6 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Ursa Major.
  • Northern sky. It rides the northern half of the sky — an easier target the further north you are.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around March — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Red and dead. Ellipticals glow reddish because every short-lived blue star they ever had has already died. Astronomers call them 'red and dead'.

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
UMa
dso type
G
hubble
E
mag
13.64
name
NGC 4335
radial velocity kms
-111
size arcmin
1.85
surface brightness
23.83

About NGC 4335

NGC 4335 is a rare galaxy. It sits in the constellation UMa and shines at apparent magnitude 13.64.

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 4335 in the constellation UMa. At apparent magnitude 13.64, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 4335 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 4335 is a rare galaxy

NGC 4335 scores 35 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 15 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Galaxy, Elliptical galaxy, Never sets (northern circumpolar), Coming towards us 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.