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Rare galaxy 47 EP

NGC 6911

RA 304.9097° · Dec 66.7283° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 6 badges
47 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • Ghostly low surface brightness +10
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 47

3 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • Barred spiral galaxy · +10
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
  • Ghostly low surface brightness · +10
  • 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

  • In perspective. Deep in the extragalactic distance — further than the entire Virgo Cluster of galaxies.
  • 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 15.6 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.

Could we get there?

  • Verdict. Impossible with our current technology — and the next millennium of it.

Properties

constellation
Dra
dist ly
115924117.8603
dso type
G
hubble
SBb
mag
15.6
name
NGC 6911
radial velocity kms
2478
redshift
0.0083
size arcmin
1.84
surface brightness
24.78

About NGC 6911

NGC 6911 is a rare galaxy. It lies about 115,924,117.9 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Dra and shines at apparent magnitude 15.6.

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 6911 in the constellation Dra. At apparent magnitude 15.6, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 6911 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 6911 is a rare galaxy

NGC 6911 scores 47 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 3 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 6 science badges — Galaxy, Outside our galaxy entirely, Barred spiral galaxy, Never sets (northern circumpolar), Ghostly low surface brightness 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.