NGC 120

NGC 120

NGC 120 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 190 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 83,000 ly, about 83% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 190 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0
190 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
83k ly
across
14.6
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 190 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 120 as it looked roughly 190 million years ago. The photons left before that much of history had passed, and are only now reaching us. This distance is estimated from the galaxy's redshift, so the lookback time is approximate.

Nearest galaxies
NGC 124Spiral1.3 million ly
apart
NGC 113Elliptical13 million ly
apart
NGC 145Spiral13 million ly
apart
NGC 127Lenticular15 million ly
apart
NGC 196Lenticular15 million ly
apart
NGC 126Lenticular15 million ly
apart
Worlds in the same direction on the sky

Source: structural data (position, morphology, brightness, redshift) from OpenNGC (CC BY-SA). Recession velocity from RC3 (de Vaucouleurs et al. 1991, via NASA/HEASARC, public domain). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).

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