Galaxy
Phantom Galaxy (M74)
In Pisces (Psc) • Magnitude 9.4 • 11 arcminutes
Open the free AstroPlanner with Phantom Galaxy pre-selected, scored against your telescope, location, and the live cloud forecast.
Often called the hardest Messier object to observe because of its extremely low surface brightness — a face-on spiral whose light is spread so thin it can be nearly invisible even in a large telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope produced a breathtaking infrared image of it in 2022, revealing intricate dust lanes and star-forming regions in extraordinary detail.
Phantom Galaxy at a glance
| Catalog IDs | M74, N 628 |
| Type | Galaxy |
| Constellation | Pisces (Psc) |
| Right ascension | 01h 36m 43s |
| Declination | +15° 46' 48" |
| Apparent magnitude | 9.40 |
| Surface brightness | 14.3 mag/arcsec² |
| Angular size | 10.5 × 9.5 arcmin |
| Max altitude at 45°N | 61° |
| Best imaging months | Jul, Aug, Sep |
How to image Phantom Galaxy
Phantom Galaxy sits in the constellation Pisces at right ascension 01h 36m 43s and declination +15° 46' 48". To frame and integrate it well, AstroPlanner will compute the optimal moonless window for tonight from your location, the field-of-view fit against your sensor and focal length, the suggested total integration time given your aperture and sky Bortle class, and a cloud-aware schedule that drops it from the plan if your nearest cloud forecast spike overlaps the best altitude window. As a galaxy, Phantom Galaxy needs the darkest skies you can find: surface brightness, not just apparent magnitude, drives whether it will lift out of the gradient.