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Plan

  • 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 4242

 

NGC 4242

Set a site to see tonight's sky

When NGC 4242 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 'GiG' (galaxy in a group).

The facts

NGC 4242 is a galaxy in Canes Venatici. SIMBAD gives its distance as 5.52 Mpc (−1.55 Mpc / +1.55 Mpc) — ≈ 18,000,000 ly, measured by the Tully–Fisher relation from 10+ measurements. The light reaching us from it now left it about 18 million years ago, after the dinosaurs and before the ice ages. SIMBAD measures it at 4.2′ × 2.9′ on the sky — 14% of the full Moon's width. At that distance, that angle means it is roughly 22,200 light-years across. Framing uses its catalogue size instead: 3.8′. It is receding from us at about 514 km/s (redshift z = 0.0017). Its morphological type is SAB. It shines at magnitude 11.0.

Sources: AstroBrain catalogue; CDS/SIMBAD astronomical database, Strasbourg (SIMBAD record NGC 4242 · distance from 2022MNRAS.511.6160K). 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 4242 · 4.2′
Angular size, as it would sit on your sky.
Milky Way · ~100,000 lyNGC 4242 · ~22,200 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

  • NGC 42171.5° away
  • M1061.7° away
  • NGC 42202.3° away
  • Box Galaxy2.4° away
  • NGC 40962.7° away
  • NGC 40512.8° 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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