The sky around AM 1110-262 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 1110-262 is an elliptical galaxy in Hydra, 65 million light-years away
AM 1110-262 (NGC 3585, PGC 34160, MCG-04-27-004) is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Hydra, 65 million light-years away. It shines at magnitude 9.7 and spans 4.7′ × 2.6′ of sky, about 88,500 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 1110-262 is AM 1110-262 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 1110-262 is its position: right ascension 11h 10m and declination -26.2°. It ranks 24 by brightness among the 40 brightest objects in the list on this site.
Finding AM 1110-262 from ξ Hya
AM 1110-262 lies 6.7° northwest of ξ Hya, the magnitude 3.5 star. Three fingers held at arm's length cover about 5°.
AM 1110-262 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 1110-262 is 65 million light-years away
The light seen from AM 1110-262 tonight left it about 65 million years ago, long before modern humans existed. It ranks 132 of 490 by distance among the Arp-Madore galaxies on Go Astronomy with a measured distance. Distance source: Cosmicflows-4 (Tully et al. 2023), Fundamental Plane/SBF.
