NGC 6508

NGC 6508

NGC 6508 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Draco about 351 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 130,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 351 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Elliptical
type · E
351 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
132k ly
across
14.0
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 351 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6508 as it looked roughly 351 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 6424Elliptical19 million ly
apart
NGC 6422Elliptical26 million ly
apart
NGC 6423Barred spiral27 million ly
apart
NGC 6419Spiral32 million ly
apart
NGC 6650Elliptical37 million ly
apart
NGC 6786Spiral38 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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