NGC 1888 — SBc in Lepus
SBc in Lepus, 3.3 arcminutes across, its light 116 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 1888
What you are looking at
NGC 1888 is a late-type spiral: a small central bulge and open, loosely wound arms full of young stars and star-forming gas. A bar of stars runs straight across its centre, as one does across the centre of the Milky Way. Its disc is steeply tilted, about 70° from face-on, so it appears as a long oval. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 111,000 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 123, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. One supernova has been recorded in it: SN 2018yu. It is cited in 74 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 13 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of NGC 1888 is light that left it about 116 million years ago; on Earth, the first flowering plants had appeared. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 2,416 km/s (5.4 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, NGC 1888 sits within the constellation Lepus. It is best placed on winter evenings: around 9:30 pm in January it stands about 39° 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 1843 (2.3° away on the sky, at least 4,540,000 light-years from it).
By apparent size it is number 409 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 17195 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | SBc |
| Angular diameter | 3.32′ |
| Right ascension | 05h22m34.4s |
| Declination | -11°29′58.1″ |
| Constellation | Lepus |
| Inclination | 69.8° |
| Light travel time | 116 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 3.3 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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