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Uncommon galaxy 26 EP

NGC 5309

RA 207.5448° · Dec -15.6184° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
26 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • On the zodiac +3
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 26

8 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • On the zodiac · +3
  • 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.

Sense of scale

  • In perspective. Deep in the extragalactic distance — further than the entire Virgo Cluster of galaxies.
  • 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 15.7 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Virgo.
  • Southern sky. It rides the southern half of the sky — an easier target the further south you are.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around April — that's when to go looking.

Could we get there?

  • Verdict. Impossible with our current technology — and the next millennium of it.

Getting there

  • Aboard Voyager 1. ≈ 9.7 trillion years at Voyager 1's speed (17 km/s).

Properties

constellation
Vir
dist ly
551334489.932
dso type
G
mag
15.71
name
NGC 5309
radial velocity kms
11599
redshift
0.0395
size arcmin
0.63
surface brightness
23.34

About NGC 5309

NGC 5309 is an uncommon galaxy. It lies about 551,334,489.9 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Vir and shines at apparent magnitude 15.71.

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 5309 in the constellation Vir. At apparent magnitude 15.71, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 5309 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 5309 is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 5309 scores 26 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 8 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Galaxy, Outside our galaxy entirely, On the zodiac 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.