NGC 3456

NGC 3456

NGC 3456 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Crater about 200 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 100,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 200 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Spiral
type · Sc
200 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
102k ly
across
13.3
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 200 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3456 as it looked roughly 200 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 3459Barred spiral3.9 million ly
apart
NGC 3479Barred spiral13 million ly
apart
NGC 3422Lenticular13 million ly
apart
NGC 3421Barred spiral16 million ly
apart
IC 665Spiral17 million ly
apart
IC 647Lenticular17 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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