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NGC 3261 – Galaxy in Vela · AstroBrain

NGC 3261

Set a site to see tonight's sky

When NGC 3261 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

A gravitationally bound system of stars, gas and dust.

Class explainer for galaxy (catalogue type). SIMBAD files it under 'EmG' (emission-line galaxy).

The facts

NGC 3261 is a galaxy in Vela. SIMBAD gives its distance as 33.4 Mpc — ≈ 109,000,000 ly from 2 measurements. The light reaching us from it now left it about 109 million years ago, while dinosaurs walked the Earth. SIMBAD measures it at 1.7′ × 1.3′ on the sky — 5% of the full Moon's width. At that distance, that angle means it is roughly 53,800 light-years across. Framing uses its catalogue size instead: 3.6′. It is receding from us at about 2,560 km/s (redshift z = 0.0086). Its morphological type is 5.0. It shines at magnitude 11.4.

Sources: AstroBrain catalogue; CDS/SIMBAD astronomical database, Strasbourg (SIMBAD record NGC 3261 · distance from 2007ApJ...659.1176M). Contains information from SIMBAD, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL). Download the SIMBAD-derived data.

For scale

Angular size, as it would sit on your sky.

Milky Way · ~100,000 lyNGC 3261 · ~53,800 ly

True width compared with our Galaxy's disc (≈100,000 ly, a round figure).

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

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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