NGC 691

NGC 691

NGC 691 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Aries about 122 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 95,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 122 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Barred spiral
type · Sbc
122 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
95k ly
across
11.7
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 122 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 691 as it looked roughly 122 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 770Elliptical7.5 million ly
apart
IC 163Barred spiral7.5 million ly
apart
NGC 772Barred spiral9.2 million ly
apart
NGC 678Barred spiral9.9 million ly
apart
NGC 680Elliptical11 million ly
apart
IC 1730Spiral15 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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