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Rare galaxy 35 EP

NGC 6825

RA 295.4783° · Dec 64.0731° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
35 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Interacting galaxy pair +14
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 35

15 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Interacting galaxy pair · +14
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) · +3

Trivia

What it actually is

  • What it actually is. Not one galaxy but two, locked in a gravitational embrace. Encounters like this shred spiral arms and trigger furious bursts of star formation.

Sense of scale

  • Sense of scale. Galaxies pass through each other almost without collisions — the stars are so far apart that they simply miss.
  • 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 15.3 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 July — that's when to go looking.

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
GPair
mag
15.3
name
NGC 6825
size arcmin
0.72

About NGC 6825

NGC 6825 is a rare galaxy. It sits in the constellation Dra and shines at apparent magnitude 15.3.

Not one galaxy but two, locked in a gravitational embrace. Encounters like this shred spiral arms and trigger furious bursts of star formation.

How to see it

Look for NGC 6825 in the constellation Dra. At apparent magnitude 15.3, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 6825 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 6825 is a rare galaxy

NGC 6825 scores 35 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 15 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Galaxy, Interacting galaxy pair, 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.