NGC 5814

NGC 5814

NGC 5814 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 491 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 491 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Spiral
type · Sab
491 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
117k ly
across
14.5
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 491 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5814 as it looked roughly 491 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 1087Spiral22 million ly
apart
NGC 5855Elliptical28 million ly
apart
IC 1072Elliptical32 million ly
apart
IC 1105Spiral39 million ly
apart
NGC 5911Elliptical50 million ly
apart
IC 1082Elliptical53 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).

← all galaxies