NGC 3742

NGC 3742

NGC 3742 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Centaurus about 130 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 98,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 2,790 km/s.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Spiral
type · Sab
130 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
98k ly
across
12.1
apparent magnitude
2,790 km/s
receding (RC3)

Because its light is 130 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3742 as it looked roughly 130 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 3749Spiral380,000 ly
apart
NGC 3783Barred spiral6.6 million ly
apart
NGC 3706Elliptical10 million ly
apart
NGC 3903Spiral11 million ly
apart
NGC 3557BElliptical12 million ly
apart
IC 2977Irregular13 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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