NGC 1284

NGC 1284

NGC 1284 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Eridanus about 419 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 230,000 ly, about 2.3 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 419 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0
419 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
228k ly
across
14.4
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 419 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 1284 as it looked roughly 419 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
IC 303Galaxy14 million ly
apart
IC 306Spiral19 million ly
apart
NGC 1296Barred spiral31 million ly
apart
IC 318Spiral33 million ly
apart
NGC 1202Barred spiral37 million ly
apart
IC 299Lenticular38 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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