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Plan

  • Tonight
  • Night Outlook
    • Weather
  • Targets
    • Saved targets
  • Plan a night
  • Night plans
    • Logbook

Tools

  • Sky atlas
  • Field of View
  • Exposure Lab
  • Calculators
  • Horizon Studio
  • Sequence Studio
    • Nights
    • Projects

Setup

  • Settings
  • About & Support
  • What’s new

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  1. Targets
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  3. NGC 288

 

NGC 288

Set a site to see tonight's sky

When NGC 288 is up, how long it stays usable and when it is in season all depend on where you observe from. Set your site and this page adds tonight's answer and its year.

Set it on Tonight

The science

What you are looking at

In one sentence

A dense, gravitationally bound swarm of very old stars orbiting in a galaxy's halo.

Class explainer for globular cluster (SIMBAD classification).

The facts

NGC 288 is a globular cluster in Sculptor. SIMBAD gives its distance as 9.80 kpc — ≈ 32,000 ly, measured by its motion through the Galaxy from 2 measurements. The light reaching us from it now left it about 32,000 years ago, when early Homo sapiens lived through the ice ages. SIMBAD measures it at 19′ × 19′ on the sky — 62% of the full Moon's width. At that distance, that angle means it is roughly 179 light-years across. Framing uses its catalogue size instead: 9.6′. It shines at magnitude 8.1.

Sources: AstroBrain catalogue; CDS/SIMBAD astronomical database, Strasbourg (SIMBAD record NGC 288 · distance from 2018MNRAS.478.1520B). Contains information from SIMBAD, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL). Download the SIMBAD-derived data.

For scale

Full Moon · 31′NGC 288 · 19′
Angular size, as it would sit on your sky.

179 ly

across — 41× the distance from the Sun to its nearest neighbour star (4.37 ly).

The same patch of sky in visible light

  • Sky image

    Observatory photos and open-licence sky surveys.

    Credits on each image.

Neighbours in the sky

  • Sculptor Galaxy1.8° away

Sky maths: apparent positions with refraction, one-minute steps; usable = full astronomical dark, at least 30° up and clear of your skyline. Survey images: CDS, Strasbourg (DSS2 and other surveys). Science: SIMBAD. The hours, heights and Moon on this page use no weather forecast; the rank is this target’s place in the Targets list, whose score also counts the cloud forecast when there is one.

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