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Uncommon galaxy 31 EP

NGC 6387

RA 262.0993° · Dec 57.5454° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
31 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 31

3 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy · +10
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) · +3

Trivia

What makes it special

  • Barred spiral. A barred spiral — a straight bar of stars driving right through the nucleus, feeding gas inwards. Our own Milky Way is one of these.

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.

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 16.8 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 June — 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
SBb
mag
16.81
name
NGC 6387
size arcmin
0.31
surface brightness
21.51

Nearby objects

About NGC 6387

NGC 6387 is an uncommon galaxy. It sits in the constellation Dra and shines at apparent magnitude 16.81.

A barred spiral — a straight bar of stars driving right through the nucleus, feeding gas inwards. Our own Milky Way is one of these.

How to see it

Look for NGC 6387 in the constellation Dra. At apparent magnitude 16.81, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 6387 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 6387 is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 6387 scores 31 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 3 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Galaxy, Barred spiral galaxy, 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.