NGC 861

NGC 861

NGC 861 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Triangulum about 381 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 160,000 ly, about 1.6 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 381 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Barred spiral
type · Sb
381 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
164k ly
across
14.7
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 381 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 861 as it looked roughly 381 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 860Elliptical47 million ly
apart
NGC 1077ABarred spiral52 million ly
apart
NGC 1077BBarred spiral65 million ly
apart
NGC 970 NED02Galaxy84 million ly
apart
IC 257Elliptical84 million ly
apart
NGC 819Barred spiral85 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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