The sky around NGC 5544/5545 at true scale, north up and east left, with stars to magnitude 8. The circles show the field of a low-power eyepiece and of 10×50 binoculars.
NGC 5544/5545 is a galaxy pair (S0-a/Sbc) in Boötes, 141 million light-years away
NGC 5544/5545 (NGC 5544, NGC 5545, Arp 199, UGC 9142, PGC 51018) is a galaxy pair (S0-a/Sbc) in the constellation Boötes, 141 million light-years away. spans 1′ × 58″ of sky, about 42,200 light-years across. It is a telescope object, 6 inches or larger, and it is highest in the evening sky in June.
Galaxy: a system of billions of stars, gas and dust held together by gravity, far outside the Milky Way. Spiral galaxies have a disk with arms; elliptical galaxies are smooth, round or oval swarms of older stars.
NGC 5544/5545 is Arp 199, one of Arp's galaxies with material ejected from nuclei
Halton Arp photographed it for his Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies (1966) as field Arp 199. It is in his group of neither spiral nor elliptical, Arp 146 to 268, under the category Galaxies with material ejected from nuclei. The field holds 2 galaxies.
NGC 5544/5545 lies 3.5° southwest of Seginus, the magnitude 3.0 star. Three fingers held at arm's length cover about 5°.
NGC 5544/5545 is highest in the evening in June
The chart gives its height above the horizon at 9 pm through the year, from 60°N to 40°S. It can be seen from the whole northern hemisphere and south to about 53°S, and never sets north of 53°N.
NGC 5544/5545 is 141 million light-years away
The light seen from NGC 5544/5545 tonight left it about 141 million years ago, long before modern humans existed. It ranks 265 of 422 by distance among the galaxies on Go Astronomy. Distance source: Hubble flow, v=3027 km/s heliocentric, H0=70.
