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Uncommon galaxy 27 EP

NGC 5238

RA 203.6771° · Dec 51.6137° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
27 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 27

7 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy · +10
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) · +3

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 13.4 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Canes Venatici.
  • 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 April — 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
CVn
dso type
G
hubble
SABd
mag
13.4
name
NGC 5238
size arcmin
1.75
surface brightness
23.68

Nearby objects

About NGC 5238

NGC 5238 is an uncommon galaxy. It sits in the constellation CVn and shines at apparent magnitude 13.4.

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 NGC 5238 in the constellation CVn. At apparent magnitude 13.4, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 5238 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 5238 is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 5238 scores 27 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 7 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Galaxy, Barred spiral galaxy 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.