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Rare galaxy 37 EP

Fornax Dwarf Spheroidal

RA 39.9972° · Dec -34.4492° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
37 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Galaxy +14
  • Has a proper name +8
  • Bright deep-sky object +6
  • Big on the sky +5
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
Total score 37

13 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Bright deep-sky object · +6
  • Has a proper name · +8
  • Elliptical galaxy · +4
  • Big on the sky · +5

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.
  • Elliptical. An elliptical galaxy: a smooth swarm of stars on randomly tilted orbits, with almost no cold gas left to build anything new.

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 7.4 it is just past naked-eye reach — ordinary binoculars will pull it in, over in Fornax.
  • 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 October — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Red and dead. Ellipticals glow reddish because every short-lived blue star they ever had has already died. Astronomers call them 'red and dead'.

What's in a name

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

Properties

constellation
For
dso type
G
hubble
E
mag
7.4
name
Fornax Dwarf Spheroidal
named
yes
radial velocity kms
55
redshift
0.0002
size arcmin
12.88
surface brightness
23.42

Nearby objects

About Fornax Dwarf Spheroidal

Fornax Dwarf Spheroidal is a rare galaxy. It sits in the constellation For and shines at apparent magnitude 7.4.

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 Fornax Dwarf Spheroidal in the constellation For. At apparent magnitude 7.4, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, Fornax Dwarf Spheroidal 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 Fornax Dwarf Spheroidal is a rare galaxy

Fornax Dwarf Spheroidal 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 5 science badges — Galaxy, Bright deep-sky object, Has a proper name, Elliptical 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.