NGC 24 — Sc in Sculptor
Sc in Sculptor, 6.2 arcminutes across, its light 27 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 24
What you are looking at
NGC 24 is a late-type spiral: a small central bulge and open, loosely wound arms full of young stars and star-forming gas. 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 48,000 light-years (taking its redshift distance, which for a galaxy this near is approximate), about half the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as an emission-line galaxy: its spectrum shows the glow of gas lit by young stars. It is cited in 278 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 20 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of NGC 24 is light that left it about 27 million years ago; on Earth, Antarctica had begun to freeze. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 553 km/s (1.2 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, NGC 24 sits within the constellation Sculptor. It is best placed on autumn evenings: around 9:30 pm in November it stands about 25° 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 45 (2.0° away on the sky, at least 940,000 light-years from it).
By apparent size it is number 71 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 701 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sc |
| Angular diameter | 6.18′ |
| Right ascension | 00h09m56.3s |
| Declination | -24°57′49.6″ |
| Constellation | Sculptor |
| Inclination | 70.1° |
| Light travel time | 27 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 6.2 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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