Cat's Eye Galaxy (M94 · NGC 4736) — SABa in Canes Venatici
The Cat's Eye Galaxy (M94, NGC 4736) as a framed fine art print. SABa in Canes Venatici, 7.7 arcminutes across, its light 15 million years old. Measured by…
About Cat's Eye Galaxy (M94 · NGC 4736)
Messier 94, sometimes called the Cat's Eye or Croc's Eye Galaxy, has an unusually bright inner ring, a band of intense star formation around a brilliant core. Beyond it lies a faint outer ring. It was long a puzzle for astronomers studying dark matter because its outer disc appears to need surprisingly little of it.
What you are looking at
The Cat's Eye Galaxy is an early-type spiral: a large, bright central bulge wrapped in smooth, tightly wound arms. A weak bar of stars crosses its centre. It is tilted about 32° 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 34,000 light-years (taking its redshift distance, which for a galaxy this near is approximate), about a third 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. It is cited in 1,493 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 54 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
Its light has been travelling for about 15 million years. When it left, grasslands were spreading across the continents. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 314 km/s (0.7 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
In the sky, the Cat's Eye Galaxy sits within the constellation Canes Venatici. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in May it stands about 89° high in the north, close to overhead, 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 4625 (1.7° away on the sky, at least 450,000 light-years from it); NGC 4618 (1.8° away on the sky, at least 460,000 light-years from it); UGC 7774 (3.0° away on the sky, at least 780,000 light-years from it).
By apparent size it is number 32 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 43495 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | SABa |
| Angular diameter | 7.75′ |
| Right ascension | 12h50m53.1s |
| Declination | +41°07′13.1″ |
| Constellation | Canes Venatici |
| Inclination | 31.8° |
| Light travel time | 15 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 7.7 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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