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Rare galaxy 40 EP

NGC 7017

RA 316.8355° · Dec -25.4869° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
40 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Interacting galaxy pair +14
  • Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) +6
  • On the zodiac +3
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 40

10 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Interacting galaxy pair · +14
  • Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) · +6
  • On the zodiac · +3
  • 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.
  • Lenticular. A lenticular galaxy: it has a disc like a spiral but has run out of the gas needed to make new stars, leaving the arms behind.

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 14.9 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Capricornus.
  • Southern sky. It rides the southern half of the sky — an easier target the further south you are.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around August — 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
Cap
dso type
GPair
hubble
S0
mag
14.93
name
NGC 7017
size arcmin
0.85
surface brightness
23.2

About NGC 7017

NGC 7017 is a rare galaxy. It sits in the constellation Cap and shines at apparent magnitude 14.93.

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 7017 in the constellation Cap. At apparent magnitude 14.93, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 7017 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 7017 is a rare galaxy

NGC 7017 scores 40 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 10 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Galaxy, Interacting galaxy pair, Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms), On the zodiac 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.