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  • Tonight
  • Night Outlook
    • Weather
  • Targets
    • Saved targets
  • Plan a night
  • Night plans
    • Logbook

Tools

  • Sky atlas
  • Field of View
  • Exposure Lab
  • Calculators
  • Horizon Studio
  • Sequence Studio
    • Nights
    • Projects

Setup

  • Settings
  • About & Support
  • What’s new

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  1. Targets
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  3. NGC 1931

 

NGC 1931

Sharpless 237 · LBN 810

Set a site to see tonight's sky

When NGC 1931 is up, how long it stays usable and when it is in season all depend on where you observe from. Set your site and this page adds tonight's answer and its year.

Set it on Tonight

The science

What you are looking at

In one sentence

Interstellar hydrogen ionised by the ultraviolet light of hot, young stars embedded in it.

Class explainer for H II region (catalogue type). SIMBAD files the object it matched under 'OpC' (open cluster).

The facts

NGC 1931 is an emission nebula in Auriga, catalogued as Sharpless 237, LBN 810. SIMBAD gives its distance as 3,068 pc — ≈ 10,010 ly from 3 measurements. The light reaching us from it now left it about 10,010 years ago, around the end of the last ice age. On the sky it spans 4.8′ — 15% of the full Moon's width. At that distance, that angle means it is roughly 14 light-years across. It shines at magnitude 10.1.

Sources: AstroBrain catalogue; Sharpless S. 1959, ApJS 4, 257, via CDS/VizieR VII/20; Lynds B.T. 1965, ApJS 12, 163, via CDS/VizieR VII/9; CDS/SIMBAD astronomical database, Strasbourg (SIMBAD record NGC 1931 · distance from 2017AstBu..72..257L). Contains information from SIMBAD, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL). Download the SIMBAD-derived data.

For scale

Full Moon · 31′NGC 1931 · 4.8′
Angular size, as it would sit on your sky.

14 ly

across — 3× the distance from the Sun to its nearest neighbour star (4.37 ly).

The same patch of sky in visible light

  • Sky image

    Observatory photos and open-licence sky surveys.

    Credits on each image.

Neighbours in the sky

  • IC 4170.7° away
  • M361.0° away
  • Barnard 2261.2° away
  • NGC 19071.3° away
  • M381.7° away
  • LBN 7941.8° away

Sky maths: apparent positions with refraction, one-minute steps; usable = full astronomical dark, at least 30° up and clear of your skyline. Survey images: CDS, Strasbourg (DSS2 and other surveys). Science: SIMBAD. The hours, heights and Moon on this page use no weather forecast; the rank is this target’s place in the Targets list, whose score also counts the cloud forecast when there is one.

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