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Uncommon galaxy 26 EP

NGC 6636 NED01

RA 275.5120° · Dec 66.6166° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
26 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Spiral galaxy +5
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 26

8 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Spiral galaxy · +5
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +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.
  • Spiral. A spiral galaxy. Those arms are not solid structures but traffic jams — density waves that stars drift into and out of as they orbit.

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 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Draco.
  • Never sets. So far north that from Britain, Canada or northern Europe it never dips below the horizon — it is up every clear night of the year.
  • 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
Sc
mag
14.03
name
NGC 6636 NED01
size arcmin
1.91
surface brightness
23.22

About NGC 6636 NED01

NGC 6636 NED01 is an uncommon galaxy. It sits in the constellation Dra and shines at apparent magnitude 14.03.

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 6636 NED01 in the constellation Dra. At apparent magnitude 14.03, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 6636 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 6636 NED01 is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 6636 NED01 scores 26 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 8 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Galaxy, 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.