Key facts
- Constellation
- Ursa Major
- Right ascension
- 10 19 55.0022
- Declination
- +45 ° 32 ′ 59.337 ″
- Distance
- 47 Mly
- Type
- SB(rs)c
- Size
- ~121,800 ly (37.33 kpc ) (estimated)
- Apparent size v
- 8.5′ × 3.3′
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Constellation
- Ursa Major
- Distance from Earth
- 12
- Image
- NGC 3198 GALEX WikiSky.jpg
Show 11 more facts
- right ascension
- 154.9791250
- catalog code
- [VDD93] 110
- Commons category
- NGC 3198
- discoverer or inventor
- William Herschel
- time of discovery or invention
- 1788-01-15
- apparent magnitude
- 12.263
- galaxy morphological type
- Sc
- redshift
- 0.002212
- declination
- 45.5496889
- radial velocity
- 680
- epoch
- J2000.0
via Wikidata · CC0
~2 min read
Encyclopedic overview
NGC 3198, also known as Herschel 146 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major. It was discovered by German-British astronomer William Herschel on 15 January 1788. NGC 3198 is located in the Leo Spur, which is part of the Virgo Supercluster, and is approximately 47 million light years away.
NGC 3198 was one of 18 galaxies targeted by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale, which aimed to calibrate various secondary distance indicators and determine the Hubble constant to an accuracy of 10%. The type and orientation of NGC 3198 made it suitable for these measurements. The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) of the HST was used to measure the magnitudes of 52 Cepheid variables, and the resulting distance modulus corresponded to a distance of 14.5 Mpc (47 million light years).
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Q1103488” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.