NGC 55 is well placed

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Deep Sky feed


Objects: NGC55

Across much of the world, NGC 55 (mag 8.2), a barred irregular galaxy in Sculptor will be well placed in the evening sky in coming weeks. On 25 September it will reach its highest point in the sky at around midnight local time, and on subsequent evenings it will culminate four minutes earlier each day.

From Cambridge , however, it is not readily observable since it lies so far south that it will never rise more than 8° above the horizon.

At a declination of 39°11'S, it is easiest to see from the southern hemisphere but cannot be seen from latitudes much north of 30°N.

At magnitude 8.2, NGC55 is quite faint, and certainly not visible to the naked eye, but can be viewed through a pair of binoculars or small telescope.

The position of NGC55 is as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
NGC55 00h14m50s 39°11'S Sculptor 8.2 0'00"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 26 Sep 2018

The sky on 26 September 2018
Sunrise
06:33
Sunset
18:34
Twilight ends
20:09
Twilight begins
04:59


Waning Gibbous

97%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:57 12:52 18:48
Venus 09:56 14:40 19:23
Moon 19:21 01:30 07:47
Mars 16:19 20:51 01:22
Jupiter 10:39 15:37 20:34
Saturn 13:59 18:33 23:06
All times shown in EDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

Image credit

© Digitised Sky Survey (DSS); Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-II)

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