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Epic cluster 54 EP

NGC 6218

RA 251.8105° · Dec -1.9478° · openngc

Real photograph of NGC 6218 📷 Real photo
Adam Block (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Score breakdown

· 6 badges
54 pts · Epic
Epic 78 pts → Anomaly
  • Globular cluster +14
  • Messier object +12
  • Coming towards us +10
  • Star cluster +7
  • Bright deep-sky object +6
  • Big on the sky +5
Total score 54

24 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

  • Star cluster · +7
  • Messier object · +12
  • Bright deep-sky object · +6
  • Globular cluster · +14
  • Big on the sky · +5
  • Coming towards us · +10

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • Messier object. One of the 110 showpieces of the Messier list — catalogued as M12.

What it actually is

  • What it actually is. A globular cluster: hundreds of thousands of stars packed into a ball a few dozen light-years across, orbiting far out in the galaxy's halo.

Sense of scale

  • Sense of scale. Stand on a planet near its core and the night sky would blaze with thousands of stars brighter than Venus. There would be no true darkness.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 6.1 it is just past naked-eye reach — ordinary binoculars will pull it in, over in Ophiuchus.
  • Seen from everywhere. It sits almost on the celestial equator, so it can be seen from essentially anywhere on Earth.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around June — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Its true colour. Globulars glow yellow-orange because they are ancient — around 12 billion years old, with every hot blue star long since burned out.

How we came to know it

  • Messier's anti-list. Charles Messier was a comet hunter, and he compiled his famous catalogue in the 1770s and 80s purely as a list of fuzzy things that are NOT comets. History remembers the distractions and forgets the comets.

Properties

constellation
Oph
dso type
GCl
mag
6.07
messier
yes
messier number
012
name
NGC 6218
radial velocity kms
-41
size arcmin
11.1

Nearby objects

About NGC 6218

NGC 6218 is an epic cluster. It sits in the constellation Oph and shines at apparent magnitude 6.07.

A globular cluster: hundreds of thousands of stars packed into a ball a few dozen light-years across, orbiting far out in the galaxy's halo.

How to see it

Look for NGC 6218 in the constellation Oph. At apparent magnitude 6.07, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 6218 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 6218 is an epic cluster

NGC 6218 scores 54 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 24 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 6 science badges — Star cluster, Messier object, Bright deep-sky object, Globular cluster, Big on the sky and Coming towards us — 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.