NGC 6784A

NGC 6784A

NGC 6784A is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Pavo about 249 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 69,000 ly, about 69% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 249 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Elliptical
type · E-S0
249 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
69k ly
across
15.0
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 249 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6784A as it looked roughly 249 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 4859Spiral8.9 million ly
apart
NGC 6776Elliptical11 million ly
apart
IC 4803Galaxy20 million ly
apart
IC 4862Barred spiral20 million ly
apart
IC 4794Elliptical21 million ly
apart
IC 4809Galaxy21 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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