NGC 3661

NGC 3661

NGC 3661 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Crater about 312 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 160,000 ly, about 1.6 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 312 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0-a
312 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
161k ly
across
14.3
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 312 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3661 as it looked roughly 312 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 2856Spiral10 million ly
apart
IC 695Spiral15 million ly
apart
IC 2889Spiral24 million ly
apart
NGC 3823Elliptical25 million ly
apart
NGC 3688Barred spiral26 million ly
apart
NGC 3775Lenticular26 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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