NGC 1253 — SABc in Eridanus
SABc in Eridanus, 4.6 arcminutes across, its light 82 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 1253
What you are looking at
NGC 1253 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. Its disc is steeply tilted, about 68° from face-on, so it appears as a long oval. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 109,000 light-years, close to the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as a Seyfert galaxy: its nucleus is lit by gas falling into its central black hole, though dust hides part of that glow from us. Halton Arp included it in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 279, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. It is cited in 115 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 14 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of NGC 1253 is light that left it about 82 million years ago; on Earth, dinosaurs were at their peak. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 1,709 km/s (3.8 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, NGC 1253 sits within the constellation Eridanus. It is best placed on winter evenings: around 9:30 pm in December it stands about 47° 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 1253A (4′ away on the sky, at least 90,000 light-years from it).
By apparent size it is number 158 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 12041 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | SABc |
| Angular diameter | 4.57′ |
| Right ascension | 03h14m09.3s |
| Declination | -02°49′20.5″ |
| Constellation | Eridanus |
| Inclination | 68.2° |
| Light travel time | 82 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 4.6 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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