NGC 615 — Sb in Cetus
Sb in Cetus, 3.2 arcminutes across, its light 90 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 615
What you are looking at
NGC 615 is a spiral with a sizeable central bulge and well-defined arms, close in type to the Milky Way. Its disc is steeply tilted, about 74° from face-on, so it appears as a long oval. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 82,000 light-years, about 84% of the Milky Way’s width.
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. It is cited in 148 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 14 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of NGC 615 is light that left it about 90 million years ago; on Earth, dinosaurs were at their peak. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 1,868 km/s (4.2 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, NGC 615 sits within the constellation Cetus. It is best placed on autumn evenings: around 9:30 pm in November it stands about 43° 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 600 (0.5° away on the sky, at least 780,000 light-years from it); NGC 586 (1.0° away on the sky, at least 1,520,000 light-years from it); IC 127 (1.4° away on the sky, at least 2,130,000 light-years from it).
By apparent size it is number 460 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 5897 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sb |
| Angular diameter | 3.15′ |
| Right ascension | 01h35m05.7s |
| Declination | -07°20′25.1″ |
| Constellation | Cetus |
| Inclination | 74.0° |
| Light travel time | 90 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 3.2 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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