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Uncommon galaxy 23 EP

NGC 7688

RA 352.7729° · Dec 21.4115° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
23 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) +6
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) +3
Total score 23

11 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) · +6
  • Faint fuzzy (mag > 13) · +3

Trivia

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.
  • 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

  • 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 15.4 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Pegasus.
  • 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 September — 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.

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
Peg
dso type
G
hubble
S0
mag
15.4
name
NGC 7688
size arcmin
0.94
surface brightness
23.89

Nearby objects

About NGC 7688

NGC 7688 is an uncommon galaxy. It sits in the constellation Peg and shines at apparent magnitude 15.4.

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.

How to see it

Look for NGC 7688 in the constellation Peg. At apparent magnitude 15.4, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 7688 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 7688 is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 7688 scores 23 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 11 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Galaxy, Lenticular galaxy (a disc with no arms) 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.