NGC 1961 — SABb in Camelopardalis
SABb in Camelopardalis, 4.4 arcminutes across, its light 188 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 1961
What you are looking at
NGC 1961 is a spiral with a sizeable central bulge and well-defined arms, close in type to the Milky Way. A weak bar of stars crosses its centre. It is tilted about 47° 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 240,000 light-years, about 2.5 times the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as a LINER galaxy: its nucleus shows the faint, low-level activity of a black hole feeding slowly. Halton Arp included it in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 184, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov listed it as VV 1140 in his catalogue of interacting galaxies. Four supernovae have been recorded in it, the first in 1998; the most recent include SN 2001is, SN 2013cc, SN 2021vaz. It is cited in 366 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 40 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
The light that reaches us from NGC 1961 today set out about 188 million years ago, when dinosaurs had begun to dominate. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 3,935 km/s (8.8 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, NGC 1961 sits within the constellation Camelopardalis. From most of the United States it never sets: it circles the north celestial pole all year, and stands highest on winter evenings, around January.
Its neighbours
At almost the same distance from us, and so its neighbours in space as well as on the sky: UGC 3342 (0.2° away on the sky, at least 740,000 light-years from it); UGC 3344 (0.3° away on the sky, at least 1,090,000 light-years from it); UGC 3319 (1.1° away on the sky, at least 3,450,000 light-years from it); UGC 3379 (1.7° away on the sky, at least 5,640,000 light-years from it), and 2 more.
By apparent size it is number 170 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 17625 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | SABb |
| Angular diameter | 4.42′ |
| Right ascension | 05h42m04.8s |
| Declination | +69°22′43.2″ |
| Constellation | Camelopardalis |
| Inclination | 47.0° |
| Light travel time | 188 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 4.4 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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