NGC 1232 — SABc in Eridanus
SABc in Eridanus, 6.8 arcminutes across, its light 77 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 1232
NGC 1232 is a grand face-on spiral in Eridanus. A famous image from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope shows its arms in remarkable detail, and it has a small companion galaxy near one side of its disc.
What you are looking at
NGC 1232 is a late-type spiral: a small central bulge and open, loosely wound arms full of young stars and star-forming gas. A weak bar of stars crosses its centre. It is tilted about 33° to our line of sight, enough to show both the shape of its arms and the depth of its disc. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 152,000 light-years, about 1.6 times the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as an emission-line galaxy: its spectrum shows the glow of gas lit by young stars. Halton Arp included it in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 41, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. It is cited in 298 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 17 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of NGC 1232 is light that left it about 77 million years ago; on Earth, dinosaurs were at their peak. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 1,610 km/s (3.6 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, NGC 1232 sits within the constellation Eridanus. It is best placed on winter evenings: around 9:30 pm in December it stands about 29° high in the south, seen from the middle of the United States.
Its neighbours
At almost the same distance from us, and so its neighbours in space as well as on the sky: NGC 1258 (1.6° away on the sky, at least 2,110,000 light-years from it); IC 1898 (1.8° away on the sky, at least 2,460,000 light-years from it); NGC 1179 (2.4° away on the sky, at least 3,190,000 light-years from it); NGC 1300 (2.6° away on the sky, at least 3,510,000 light-years from it), and 2 more.
By apparent size it is number 51 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 11819 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | SABc |
| Angular diameter | 6.79′ |
| Right ascension | 03h09m45.5s |
| Declination | -20°34′44.5″ |
| Constellation | Eridanus |
| Inclination | 32.7° |
| Light travel time | 77 million years |
| Bar | yes, from the catalogue |
Check every figure above in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database
What is sold
A print of this galaxy and the record of the calculation, once. When it sells it leaves the register and is not offered again. We assign no names and no ownership — nobody can sell you those.
At 6.8 arcminutes this is a Exceptional galaxy, which is the tier where a real photograph shows clear structure and dust lanes. The tier comes from the measured diameter, not from a price list.
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