NGC 2668

NGC 2668

NGC 2668 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Lynx about 350 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 130,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 350 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Spiral
type · Sab
350 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
125k ly
across
14.8
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 350 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 2668 as it looked roughly 350 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 2405Barred spiral5.5 million ly
apart
IC 2400Spiral24 million ly
apart
NGC 2704Spiral26 million ly
apart
IC 2434Barred spiral27 million ly
apart
NGC 2746Spiral30 million ly
apart
IC 527Barred spiral35 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).

← all galaxies