Key facts
- Constellation
- Cancer
- Right ascension
- 08 35 17.3294
- Declination
- +28 ° 28 ′ 24.294 ″
- Redshift
- 0.007 192 ± 0.000 009
- Heliocentric radial velocity
- 2,156 ± 3 km/s
- Distance
- 93.0 Mly (28.5 Mpc )
- Type
- SB(s)b
- Size
- ~59,300 ly (18.18 kpc ) (estimated)
- Apparent size v
- 2.3′ × 1.4′
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Distance from Earth
- 23
- Image
- NGC2608 - HST - Potw2023a.tiff
Show 9 more facts
- catalog code
- Gaia DR2 704561248580492800
- Commons category
- NGC 2608
- time of discovery or invention
- 1785-03-12
- redshift
- 0.007122
- apparent magnitude
- 12.030
- right ascension
- 128.82220974047720
- galaxy morphological type
- SABbc
- declination
- 28.47340237553020
- radial velocity
- 2126
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~2 min read
Article
NGC 2608 (also known as Arp 12) is a barred spiral galaxy located 93 million light-years away in the constellation Cancer (the Crab). It was discovered by German-British astronomer William Herschel on 12 March 1785. It spans 62,000 light-years, approximately 60% of the Milky Way's diameter. It is considered a grand design spiral galaxy and is classified as SB(s)b, meaning that the galaxy's arms wind moderately (neither tightly nor loosely) around the prominent central bar.
It was classified under "galaxies with split arms" in the 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies by Halton Arp, who noted that the "nucleus may be double or superimposed star". NGC 2608 is now thought to be a pair of interacting galaxies.