NGC 6806

NGC 6806

NGC 6806 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius about 270 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 96,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 5,717 km/s.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Spiral
type · Sc
270 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
96k ly
across
13.2
apparent magnitude
5,717 km/s
receding (RC3)

Because its light is 270 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6806 as it looked roughly 270 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 4873Barred spiral18 million ly
apart
NGC 6794Spiral21 million ly
apart
NGC 6768Elliptical23 million ly
apart
NGC 6805Elliptical24 million ly
apart
IC 4874Spiral24 million ly
apart
IC 4926Elliptical30 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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