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Rare galaxy 37 EP

Fireworks Galaxy

RA 308.7180° · Dec 60.1539° · openngc

Real photograph of Fireworks Galaxy 📷 Real photo
Andreigusan (CC0)
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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
37 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Barred spiral galaxy +10
  • Has a proper name +8
  • Big on the sky +5
Total score 37

13 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Has a proper name · +8
  • Barred spiral galaxy · +10
  • Big on the sky · +5

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

  • 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 9.1 you'll want a small backyard telescope, over in Cygnus.
  • 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.

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.

What's in a name

  • Named. Notable enough to have earned a proper name, not just a catalogue number.

Properties

constellation
Cyg
dso type
G
hubble
SABc
mag
9.05
name
Fireworks Galaxy
named
yes
radial velocity kms
45
redshift
0.0001
size arcmin
11.4
surface brightness
23.73

Nearby objects

About Fireworks Galaxy

Fireworks Galaxy is a rare galaxy. It sits in the constellation Cyg and shines at apparent magnitude 9.05.

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 Fireworks Galaxy in the constellation Cyg. At apparent magnitude 9.05, a small backyard telescope will bring it into view.

Like any astronomical target, Fireworks Galaxy 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 Fireworks Galaxy is a rare galaxy

Fireworks Galaxy scores 37 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 13 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Galaxy, Has a proper name, Barred spiral galaxy and Big on the sky — 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.