NGC 566

NGC 566

NGC 566 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Pisces about 253 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 89,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 253 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0
253 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
89k ly
across
14.5
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 253 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 566 as it looked roughly 253 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 508Elliptical7.5 million ly
apart
NGC 494Spiral8.0 million ly
apart
IC 1692Lenticular8.3 million ly
apart
IC 1677Spiral8.6 million ly
apart
IC 1679Lenticular9.7 million ly
apart
NGC 472Barred spiral10 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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