NGC 897

NGC 897

NGC 897 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Fornax about 224 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 130,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 4,802 km/s.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Spiral
type · Sa
224 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
131k ly
across
11.8
apparent magnitude
4,802 km/s
receding (RC3)

Because its light is 224 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 897 as it looked roughly 224 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 1811Barred spiral8.1 million ly
apart
NGC 964Spiral12 million ly
apart
IC 1813Lenticular15 million ly
apart
IC 1816Barred spiral21 million ly
apart
IC 1833Lenticular29 million ly
apart
IC 1864Elliptical29 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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