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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 5879

 

NGC 5879

Set a site to see tonight's sky

When NGC 5879 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 'AGN' (active galactic nucleus).

The facts

NGC 5879 is a galaxy in Draco. SIMBAD gives its distance as 13.885 Mpc (−6.259 Mpc / +6.259 Mpc) — ≈ 45,287,000 ly from 10+ measurements. The light reaching us from it now left it about 45.3 million years ago, after the dinosaurs and before the ice ages. SIMBAD measures it at 5.3′ × 2.0′ on the sky — 17% of the full Moon's width. At that distance, that angle means it is roughly 69,500 light-years across. Framing uses its catalogue size instead: 3.8′. It is receding from us at about 770 km/s (redshift z = 0.0026). Its morphological type is S_AB. It shines at magnitude 11.5.

Sources: AstroBrain catalogue; CDS/SIMBAD astronomical database, Strasbourg (SIMBAD record NGC 5879 · distance from 2025ApJ...978...77B). 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 5879 · 5.3′
Angular size, as it would sit on your sky.
Milky Way · ~100,000 lyNGC 5879 · ~69,500 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

  • Splinter Galaxy1.0° away
  • Spindle Galaxy1.3° 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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