← Back to dex
Rare galaxy 37 EP

NGC 6043

RA 241.2550° · Dec 17.7739° · openngc

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

Computing the sky for your location…

Score breakdown

· 4 badges
37 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Interacting galaxy pair +14
  • Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) +6
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 37

13 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Interacting galaxy pair · +14
  • Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) · +6
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) · +3

Trivia

What it actually is

  • What it actually is. Not one galaxy but two, locked in a gravitational embrace. Encounters like this shred spiral arms and trigger furious bursts of star formation.
  • 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

  • Sense of scale. Galaxies pass through each other almost without collisions — the stars are so far apart that they simply miss.
  • 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 15.4 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Hercules.
  • 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.

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
Her
dso type
GPair
hubble
E-S0
mag
15.4
name
NGC 6043
size arcmin
0.74
surface brightness
23.4

Nearby objects

About NGC 6043

NGC 6043 is a rare galaxy. It sits in the constellation Her and shines at apparent magnitude 15.4.

Not one galaxy but two, locked in a gravitational embrace. Encounters like this shred spiral arms and trigger furious bursts of star formation.

How to see it

Look for NGC 6043 in the constellation Her. At apparent magnitude 15.4, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 6043 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 6043 is a rare galaxy

NGC 6043 scores 37 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 13 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Galaxy, Interacting galaxy pair, Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) 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.