NGC 4414 — Sc in Coma Berenices
Sc in Coma Berenices, 1.9 arcminutes across, its light 35 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 4414
NGC 4414 is a flocculent spiral with feathery, short arm segments. Hubble's image of it, made for the project that measured the universe's expansion rate, became one of the telescope's iconic pictures of a galaxy.
What you are looking at
NGC 4414 is a late-type spiral: a small central bulge and open, loosely wound arms full of young stars and star-forming gas. It is tilted about 57° 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 20,000 light-years (taking its redshift distance, which for a galaxy this near is approximate), about a fifth the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as a member of a cluster of galaxies. Four supernovae have been recorded in it, the first in 1974; the most recent include SN 2013df, SN 2021J, SN 2023hlf. It is cited in 601 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 38 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
The light that reaches us from NGC 4414 today set out about 35 million years ago, when the planet had come through its hottest interval since the dinosaurs. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 733 km/s (1.6 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe. For a galaxy this close, its own motion through space is a large share of that speed, so the distance worked out from it is approximate; distances measured from individual stars in it can differ.
Finding it in the sky
NGC 4414 lies in Coma Berenices. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in May it stands about 81° 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: UGC 7438 (1.5° away on the sky, at least 900,000 light-years from it); NGC 4314 (1.6° away on the sky, at least 970,000 light-years from it); UGC 7673 (1.9° away on the sky, at least 1,180,000 light-years from it); UGC 7457 (2.0° away on the sky, at least 1,230,000 light-years from it), and 6 more.
By apparent size it is number 1,689 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 40692 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sc |
| Angular diameter | 1.95′ |
| Right ascension | 12h26m27.1s |
| Declination | +31°13′24.7″ |
| Constellation | Coma Berenices |
| Inclination | 56.6° |
| Light travel time | 35 million years |
| Bar | not recorded |
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 1.9 arcminutes this is a Collection galaxy, which is the tier where a real photograph shows its shape and how far it is tilted away from us. The tier comes from the measured diameter, not from a price list.
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