NGC 459

NGC 459

NGC 459 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Pisces about 592 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 592 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Barred spiral
type · Sbc
592 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
100k ly
across
15.7
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 592 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 459 as it looked roughly 592 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 115Elliptical36 million ly
apart
IC 1646Spiral58 million ly
apart
IC 1645Elliptical67 million ly
apart
IC 1620Barred spiral73 million ly
apart
IC 75Barred spiral76 million ly
apart
IC 62Barred spiral90 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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