← Back to dex
Common galaxy 21 EP

NGC 4486A

RA 187.7405° · Dec 12.2704° · openngc

Loading sky survey…
🌌 View in 3D star map
Tonight’s visibility

Computing the sky for your location…

Score breakdown

· 3 badges
21 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Galaxy +14
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
  • On the zodiac +3
Total score 21

1 more point to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Elliptical galaxy · +4
  • On the zodiac · +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 12.5 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Virgo.
  • 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
Vir
dso type
G
hubble
E
mag
12.53
name
NGC 4486A
radial velocity kms
183
redshift
0.0006
size arcmin
0.92
surface brightness
21.42

About NGC 4486A

NGC 4486A is a common galaxy. It sits in the constellation Vir and shines at apparent magnitude 12.53.

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 4486A in the constellation Vir. At apparent magnitude 12.53, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 4486A 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 4486A is a common galaxy

NGC 4486A 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, Elliptical galaxy and On the zodiac — 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.