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Uncommon galaxy 27 EP

NGC 6021

RA 239.3779° · Dec 15.9561° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
27 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 27

7 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • Elliptical galaxy · +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.
  • Elliptical. An elliptical galaxy: a smooth swarm of stars on randomly tilted orbits, with almost no cold gas left to build anything new.

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

Could we get there?

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

Properties

constellation
Se1
dist ly
218005507.5847
dso type
G
hubble
E
mag
13.03
name
NGC 6021
radial velocity kms
4642
redshift
0.0156
size arcmin
1.55
surface brightness
23.86

About NGC 6021

NGC 6021 is an uncommon galaxy. It lies about 218,005,507.6 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Se1 and shines at apparent magnitude 13.03.

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 6021 in the constellation Se1. At apparent magnitude 13.03, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 6021 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 6021 is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 6021 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, Outside our galaxy entirely, Elliptical 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.