NGC 3546

NGC 3546

NGC 3546 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Crater about 208 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 120,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 208 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Elliptical
type · E-S0
208 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
115k ly
across
14.5
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 208 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3546 as it looked roughly 208 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 665Spiral10 million ly
apart
NGC 3479Barred spiral12 million ly
apart
NGC 3469Spiral14 million ly
apart
NGC 3421Barred spiral17 million ly
apart
NGC 3422Lenticular17 million ly
apart
IC 647Lenticular18 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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