NGC 320

NGC 320

NGC 320 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 257 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 66,000 ly, about 66% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 257 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0-a
257 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
66k ly
across
14.6
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 257 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 320 as it looked roughly 257 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 335Barred spiral14 million ly
apart
IC 1610Lenticular25 million ly
apart
NGC 247BBarred spiral28 million ly
apart
IC 1616Barred spiral32 million ly
apart
IC 1623BIrregular33 million ly
apart
IC 1670BLenticular33 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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