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When NGC 4818 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.
The science
In one sentence
A gravitationally bound system of stars, gas and dust.
Class explainer for galaxy (catalogue type).
NGC 4818 is a galaxy in Virgo. SIMBAD gives its distance as 12.4 Mpc (−2.4 Mpc / +2.4 Mpc) — ≈ 40,400,000 ly, measured by the Tully–Fisher relation from 7 measurements. The light reaching us from it now left it about 40.4 million years ago, after the dinosaurs and before the ice ages. SIMBAD measures it at 6.9′ × 2.4′ on the sky — 22% of the full Moon's width. At that distance, that angle means it is roughly 81,000 light-years across. Framing uses its catalogue size instead: 4.3′. It is receding from us at about 659 km/s (redshift z = 0.0022). Its morphological type is SBab. It shines at magnitude 11.3.
Sources: AstroBrain catalogue; CDS/SIMBAD astronomical database, Strasbourg (SIMBAD record NGC 4818 · 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.
Sky image
Observatory photos and open-licence sky surveys.
Credits on each image.
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.