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Epic galaxy 51 EP

NGC 5457

RA 210.8023° · Dec 54.3489° · openngc

Real photograph of NGC 5457 📷 Real photo
Image: European Space Agency & NASA
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Score breakdown

· 6 badges
51 pts · Epic
Epic 78 pts → Anomaly
  • Galaxy +14
  • Messier object +12
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • Bright deep-sky object +6
  • Big on the sky +5
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
Total score 51

27 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Messier object · +12
  • Bright deep-sky object · +6
  • Barred spiral galaxy · +10
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
  • Big on the sky · +5

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.

Hard to believe

  • Messier object. One of the 110 showpieces of the Messier list — catalogued as M101.

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 7.9 it is just past naked-eye reach — ordinary binoculars will pull it in, 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 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.

Properties

constellation
UMa
dso type
G
hubble
SABc
mag
7.9
messier
yes
messier number
101
name
NGC 5457
radial velocity kms
243
redshift
0.0008
size arcmin
23.99
surface brightness
23.97

Nearby objects

About NGC 5457

NGC 5457 is an epic galaxy. It sits in the constellation UMa and shines at apparent magnitude 7.9.

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 5457 in the constellation UMa. At apparent magnitude 7.9, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 5457 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 5457 is an epic galaxy

NGC 5457 scores 51 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 27 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 6 science badges — Galaxy, Messier object, Bright deep-sky object, Barred spiral galaxy, Never sets (northern circumpolar) 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.