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Epic cluster 53 EP

NGC 6254

RA 254.2875° · Dec -4.0993° · openngc

Real photograph of NGC 6254 📷 Real photo
Manfred Höcherl (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
53 pts · Epic
Epic 78 pts → Anomaly
  • Globular cluster +14
  • Bright enough for the unaided eye +14
  • Messier object +12
  • Star cluster +7
  • Bright deep-sky object +6
Total score 53

25 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

  • Star cluster · +7
  • Messier object · +12
  • Bright deep-sky object · +6
  • Globular cluster · +14
  • Bright enough for the unaided eye · +14

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • Messier object. One of the 110 showpieces of the Messier list — catalogued as M10.

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 5 you can see it with your own eyes from a dark site, 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
4.98
messier
yes
messier number
010
name
NGC 6254
radial velocity kms
74
redshift
0.0002
size arcmin
9.3

Nearby objects

About NGC 6254

NGC 6254 is an epic cluster. It sits in the constellation Oph and shines at apparent magnitude 4.98.

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 6254 in the constellation Oph. At apparent magnitude 4.98, it can be glimpsed with the unaided eye under dark skies.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 6254 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 6254 is an epic cluster

NGC 6254 scores 53 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 25 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Star cluster, Messier object, Bright deep-sky object, Globular cluster and Bright enough for the unaided eye — 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.