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Uncommon galaxy 33 EP

NGC 5488

RA 212.0130° · Dec -33.3149° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
33 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 33

1 more point to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • 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

  • 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 13.3 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Centaurus.
  • 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.

Properties

constellation
Cen
dist ly
209512693.5518
dso type
G
hubble
SABb
mag
13.31
name
NGC 5488
radial velocity kms
4463
redshift
0.015
size arcmin
2.63
surface brightness
23.22

About NGC 5488

NGC 5488 is an uncommon galaxy. It lies about 209,512,693.6 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Cen and shines at apparent magnitude 13.31.

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 5488 in the constellation Cen. At apparent magnitude 13.31, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 5488 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 5488 is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 5488 scores 33 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 1 point would lift it into a rarer tier.

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