NGC 1361

NGC 1361

NGC 1361 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Eridanus about 245 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 88,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 245 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Elliptical
type · E-S0
245 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
88k ly
across
14.7
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 245 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 1361 as it looked roughly 245 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 344Barred spiral15 million ly
apart
NGC 1397Lenticular16 million ly
apart
NGC 1285Barred spiral18 million ly
apart
NGC 1303Lenticular18 million ly
apart
NGC 1424Spiral21 million ly
apart
NGC 1324Barred spiral22 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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