Rim Nebula
ILLUSTRATION FROM MAJOR AXIS 20′ · AXIS RATIO 0.60
OBSERVING
FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see Rim Nebula for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.
Say where you are, and this line says when Rim Nebula is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECERim Nebula covers 20.0′ of sky against a of 1.08°, so at 48× it is comfortably framed.
- 48×
- 1.08
- 1.25
- 13.0
- SIZE ON THE SKY
- 20.0
- FILLS OF THE FIELD
- 31% of the width
Rim Nebula is not a point of light, so the limit above is the wrong one to hold it against: the same brightness spread over 20.0′ of sky is harder than a star of it, and goes first. Catalogued sizes are measured to a photographic contour, and the part an eye sees is usually smaller.
APPARENT PLACE
EQUINOX J2026.8Where a telescope has to be pointed today, which is not quite where the catalogue records the object: the coordinate grid itself has turned since the year 2000 the catalogue is referred to.
- RIGHT ASCENSION
- DECLINATION
- GRID TURNED SINCE
- 20.3
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- none published
Computed for 2026-10-24 00:00 UT. No proper motion is published for Rim Nebula, so nothing here moves the object; what separates this from the catalogued position above is the coordinate grid turning under it — about fifty arcseconds a year of precession since 2000, and the small nodding of the Earth’s axis on top of that. The catalogue it came from publishes no error for that position, so nothing here says how far this arithmetic can be trusted — the digits above are as precise as the place they were computed from, and no more. Aberration, parallax and refraction are left out. Aberration swings every position by up to twenty arcseconds over a year; parallax stays under an arcsecond for all but the nearest stars; refraction is nothing overhead and about half a degree at the horizon, where it answers to the air, not the sky. The same figure for any date.
CATALOG DATA
7 FIELDSThe raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.
WHERE IT IS AND HOW IT MOVES
Position, motion across the sky and the size it covers on it. These are measurements of the object as seen from here, so every one of them depends on where here is.
- Major axis
- 20
- Minor axis
- 12
WHEN IT WAS FOUND
Who first saw it, from where, and by what method.
- Discovered by
- John Frederick William Herschel
OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS
The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.
- Also known as
- Firebird Nebula
- OpenNGC type code
- Neb
- Wikidata item
- Q124309
- Wikipedia article
- NGC 6188
ALSO KNOWN AS
2 DESIGNATIONS- Common name Rim Nebula
- NGC NGC 6188
LOOK IT UP ELSEWHERE
3 SERVICESEach link carries the identifier printed beside it. Nothing on this page is a measurement of our own, so a number that disagrees with one of these is worth reporting — and a service that has never catalogued this object under this name will say so plainly.
- SIMBADNGC 6188
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- ADSobject:"NGC 6188"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR600″ around 250.0243 -48.6623
Every published table with a row at this position, searched by coordinates rather than by name.
CITE THIS PAGE
DR1This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.
SpaceCatalog. Rim Nebula [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/ngc-6188
@misc{spacecatalog_ngc-6188,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{Rim Nebula}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/ngc-6188},
note = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from OpenNGC.}
}The values above were taken from OpenNGC — CC-BY-SA-4.0. Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue, and its licence is share-alike: the terms reach whatever you build from these rows.
That catalogue asks for this acknowledgement: OpenNGC, Mattia Verga (github.com/mattiaverga/OpenNGC). Fields derived from it stay under CC BY-SA 4.0.