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Rare galaxy 43 EP

NGC 6916

RA 305.8878° · Dec 58.3441° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
43 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • Ghostly low surface brightness +10
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 43

7 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • Barred spiral galaxy · +10
  • 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 15.2 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Cygnus.
  • 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 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
Cyg
dist ly
144489586.1124
dso type
G
hubble
SBbc
mag
15.21
name
NGC 6916
radial velocity kms
3085
redshift
0.0103
size arcmin
1.64
surface brightness
24.72

About NGC 6916

NGC 6916 is a rare galaxy. It lies about 144,489,586.1 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Cyg and shines at apparent magnitude 15.21.

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 6916 in the constellation Cyg. At apparent magnitude 15.21, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 6916 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 6916 is a rare galaxy

NGC 6916 scores 43 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 7 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Galaxy, Outside our galaxy entirely, Barred spiral galaxy, 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.