NGC 1606

NGC 1606

NGC 1606 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Eridanus about 241 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 40,000 ly, about 40% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 241 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0-a
241 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
40k ly
across
16.5
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 241 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 1606 as it looked roughly 241 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 1603Lenticular350,000 ly
apart
NGC 1612Lenticular6.2 million ly
apart
NGC 1601Lenticular8.0 million ly
apart
NGC 1618Barred spiral12 million ly
apart
NGC 1622Spiral17 million ly
apart
NGC 1643Barred spiral17 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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