RA 204.2540° · Dec -29.8654° · openngc
📷 Real photoComputing the sky for your location…
22 more points to reach Anomaly.
Southern Pinwheel Galaxy is an epic galaxy. It lies about 24,207,313.7 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Hya and shines at apparent magnitude 7.21.
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.
Look for Southern Pinwheel Galaxy in the constellation Hya. At apparent magnitude 7.21, it is an easy target for binoculars.
Like any astronomical target, Southern Pinwheel Galaxy 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.
Southern Pinwheel Galaxy scores 56 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 22 points would lift it into a rarer tier.
That score comes from 7 science badges — Galaxy, Outside our galaxy entirely, Messier object, Bright deep-sky object, Has a proper name, Spiral galaxy and Big on the sky — 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.