NGC 3057

NGC 3057

NGC 3057 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Draco about 72 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 30,000 ly, about 30% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 72 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Spiral
type · Sd
72 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
30k ly
across
13.1
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 72 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3057 as it looked roughly 72 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 2760Elliptical5.4 million ly
apart
NGC 2748Barred spiral6.3 million ly
apart
NGC 2655Lenticular7.5 million ly
apart
IC 512Spiral7.8 million ly
apart
NGC 4331Irregular10 million ly
apart
NGC 3901Spiral10 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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