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Common galaxy 17 EP

NGC 6623 NED01

RA 274.9284° · Dec 23.7018° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 2 badges
17 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Galaxy +14
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 17

5 more points to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • 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.

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

  • 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
Her
dso type
G
mag
14.4
name
NGC 6623 NED01
size arcmin
0.15

Nearby objects

About NGC 6623 NED01

NGC 6623 NED01 is a common galaxy. It sits in the constellation Her and shines at apparent magnitude 14.4.

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 6623 NED01 in the constellation Her. At apparent magnitude 14.4, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 6623 NED01 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 6623 NED01 is a common galaxy

NGC 6623 NED01 scores 17 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 5 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 2 science badges — 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.