← Back to dex
Common galaxy 21 EP

NGC 6442

RA 266.7139° · Dec 20.7611° · openngc

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

Computing the sky for your location…

Score breakdown

· 3 badges
21 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Galaxy +14
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 21

1 more point to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • 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

  • 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 14.4 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 June — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Red and dead. Ellipticals glow reddish because every short-lived blue star they ever had has already died. Astronomers call them 'red and dead'.

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
G
hubble
E
mag
14.44
name
NGC 6442
size arcmin
1.42
surface brightness
23.97

Nearby objects

About NGC 6442

NGC 6442 is a common galaxy. It sits in the constellation Her and shines at apparent magnitude 14.44.

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 6442 in the constellation Her. At apparent magnitude 14.44, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 6442 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 6442 is a common galaxy

NGC 6442 scores 21 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 1 point would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Galaxy, 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.