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Uncommon galaxy 30 EP

NGC 5938

RA 234.1095° · Dec -66.8597° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
30 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
Total score 30

4 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • Barred spiral galaxy · +10

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 11.5 you'll want a small backyard telescope, over in Triangulum Australe.
  • Southern sky only. So far south it never rises for most of the northern hemisphere. To see it you'd have to travel to Chile, South Africa or Australia.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around May — that's when to go looking.

Could we get there?

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

Properties

constellation
TrA
dist ly
164059376.3428
dso type
G
hubble
SBbc
mag
11.49
name
NGC 5938
radial velocity kms
3500
redshift
0.0117
size arcmin
2.31
surface brightness
22.79

About NGC 5938

NGC 5938 is an uncommon galaxy. It lies about 164,059,376.3 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation TrA and shines at apparent magnitude 11.49.

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 5938 in the constellation TrA. At apparent magnitude 11.49, a small backyard telescope will bring it into view.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 5938 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 5938 is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 5938 scores 30 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 4 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Galaxy, Outside our galaxy entirely and Barred spiral galaxy — 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.