The sky around AM 956-264 NED01 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.
AM 956-264 NED01 is an elliptical galaxy in Hydra, 117 million light-years away
AM 956-264 NED01 (NGC 3078, PGC 28806, MCG-04-24-009) is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Hydra, 117 million light-years away. It shines at magnitude 11.2 and spans 2.5′ × 2.1′ of sky, about 85,100 light-years across. It is a telescope object, 6 inches or larger, and it is highest in the evening sky in April.
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.
AM 956-264 NED01 is AM 956-264 NED01 in the Arp-Madore catalog
Halton Arp and Barry Madore listed it in A Catalogue of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations (1987), from their search of the UK Schmidt southern sky survey plates. The number 956-264 is its position: right ascension 9h 56m and declination -26.4°.
Finding AM 956-264 NED01 from ψ Vel
AM 956-264 NED01 lies 14.7° northeast of ψ Vel, the magnitude 3.6 star. A fist held at arm's length covers about 10°.
AM 956-264 NED01 is highest in the evening in April
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 southern hemisphere and north to about 63°N, and never sets south of 63°S.
AM 956-264 NED01 is 117 million light-years away
The light seen from AM 956-264 NED01 tonight left it about 117 million years ago, long before modern humans existed. It ranks 274 of 490 by distance among the Arp-Madore galaxies on Go Astronomy with a measured distance. Distance source: Cosmicflows-4 (Tully et al. 2023), SBF.
