← Back to dex
Uncommon galaxy 27 EP

NGC 5976

RA 234.1999° · Dec 59.3978° · openngc

Loading sky survey…
🌌 View in 3D star map
Tonight’s visibility

Computing the sky for your location…

Score breakdown

· 4 badges
27 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) +6
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 27

7 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) · +6
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
  • 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.
  • Lenticular. A lenticular galaxy: it has a disc like a spiral but has run out of the gas needed to make new stars, leaving the arms behind.

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 14.8 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Draco.
  • 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 May — 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
Dra
dso type
G
hubble
S0
mag
14.77
name
NGC 5976
size arcmin
0.98
surface brightness
24.41

About NGC 5976

NGC 5976 is an uncommon galaxy. It sits in the constellation Dra and shines at apparent magnitude 14.77.

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 5976 in the constellation Dra. At apparent magnitude 14.77, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 5976 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 5976 is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 5976 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 4 science badges — Galaxy, Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms), Never sets (northern circumpolar) 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.