ESO 136-013

GALAXYSpiral galaxy Sb

ILLUSTRATION FROM HUBBLE TYPE Sb · MAJOR AXIS 0.89′ · AXIS RATIO 0.40 · POSITION ANGLE 106°

[

OVERVIEW

] GALAXY

ESO 136-013 is a spiral galaxy Sb in the constellation Triangulum Australe, 219.3 from Earth, shining at apparent magnitude 13.18 (). Other catalogues list it as PGC 56851 and WISExSCOS J160315.32-602127.1.

WHAT IT IS
Spiral galaxy
HOW FAR
219.3

The light arriving now left it that long ago.

HOW BIG ON THE SKY
53

Small enough that the full Moon would cover it several times over.

HOW BRIGHT (B)

Faint: it takes a large telescope.

WHERE TO LOOK
Triangulum Australe

The patch of sky it sits in, as seen from Earth.

[

THE MODEL

] LIGHT ALONG THE RAY
OUTSIDE THE SURVEYED VOLUME · DRAG TO ORBIT

CALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · ANGULAR SIZE AT THE CATALOGUED DISTANCE · HUBBLE TYPE Sb · MAJOR AXIS 0.89′ · AXIS RATIO 0.40 · POSITION ANGLE 106° · NO SURFACE — DRAWN AS A VOLUME · AXIS RATIO READ AS AN INCLINATION

An exponential disc with a bulge at the middle and arms wound at the pitch angle its Hubble type implies, with the dust drawn where the dust is: on the inner edge of each arm, ahead of the crest, because inside co-rotation the gas overtakes the spiral pattern and piles up as it goes in. The shape of it is the catalogued morphology; the tilt is the catalogued axis ratio read as an inclination, which is what a round disc's axis ratio is. Nothing measured the depth — a disc that looks this elliptical from the Sun is this far over, and the model is that disc seen from wherever you turn it to. The two colours are two populations: old stars in the bulge and the disc, young ones in the arms, both through the same blackbody table as the star pages. Drag it, or use the arrow keys, to look from another direction. The stars behind are the 498,631 this catalogue holds real distances for, drawn from where the camera actually is — but every one of them is within 170 parsecs of the Sun and this object is much further out, so from here that whole neighbourhood is a knot in one direction and the rest of the sky is empty. The view you land on looks the other way; turn back towards the Sun and the stars come with it. What the readout says is which of the two the frame is pointed at. The emptiness is not a missing backdrop — it is the edge of what this catalogue has measured.

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see ESO 136-013 for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.

TONIGHT

Say where you are, and this line says when ESO 136-013 is worth going out for.

[

THROUGH AN EYEPIECE

] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECE
NE
FIELD 1.08°

Near the faint end of this catalogue: a 300 mm telescope reaches it and a 150 mm one does not. ESO 136-013 covers 53″ of sky against a of 1.08°, so at 48× it is a speck in a wide field.

48×
1.08
1.25
13.0
SIZE ON THE SKY
53
FILLS OF THE FIELD
1% of the width
APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
13.18 · too faint for this

ESO 136-013 is not a point of light, so the limit above is the wrong one to hold it against: the same brightness spread over 53″ of sky is harder than a star of it, and goes first. Catalogued sizes are measured to a photographic contour, and the part an eye sees is usually smaller.

FIND IT ON THE SKY MAP ↗
[

APPARENT PLACE

] EQUINOX J2026.7

Where a telescope has to be pointed today, which is not quite where the catalogue records the object: the coordinate grid itself has turned since the year 2000 the catalogue is referred to.

RIGHT ASCENSION
DECLINATION
GRID TURNED SINCE
17.5
PROPER MOTION SINCE
none published

Computed for 2026-09-01 00:00 UT. No proper motion is published for ESO 136-013, so nothing here moves the object; what separates this from the catalogued position above is the coordinate grid turning under it — about fifty arcseconds a year of precession since 2000, and the small nodding of the Earth’s axis on top of that. Aberration and refraction are not included, and neither is parallax; each is under an arcminute, which is also about as well as the catalogued position is known. The same figure for any date.

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CATALOG DATA

] 9 FIELDS

The raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.

WHAT KIND OF THING IT IS

What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.

Hubble type
Stellar mass
1.49×10¹⁰ ±6.5×10⁹

HOW BRIGHT IT IS

What the light adds up to, measured through one filter at a time. A magnitude is a brightness on a backwards scale — the smaller the number, the brighter the object.

Apparent magnitude ()

WHERE IT IS AND HOW IT MOVES

Position, motion across the sky and the size it covers on it. These are measurements of the object as seen from here, so every one of them depends on where here is.

Redshift (z)
Redshift (z, CMB frame)
Major axis
0.89
Minor axis
0.36
106

WHERE THESE FIGURES CAME FROM

Which catalogue, paper or model each of the fields above was read from, where the source named one.

Morphology from
SIMBAD (2003A&A...412...45P, quality E)
[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 2 DESIGNATIONS
  • PGC PGC 56851
  • WISExSCOS WISExSCOS J160315.32-602127.1
[

LOOK IT UP ELSEWHERE

] 4 SERVICES

Each link carries the identifier printed beside it. Nothing on this page is a measurement of our own, so a number that disagrees with one of these is worth reporting — and a service that has never catalogued this object under this name will say so plainly.

[

CITE THIS PAGE

] DR1

This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.

PLAIN TEXT
SpaceCatalog. ESO 136-013 [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/eso-136-013
BIBTEX
@misc{spacecatalog_eso-136-013,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{ESO 136-013}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/eso-136-013},
  note         = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from GLADE+ (Galaxy List for the Advanced Detector Era).}
}

The values above were taken from GLADE+ (Galaxy List for the Advanced Detector Era) — VizieR terms; cite Dalya+ 2022 (2022MNRAS.514.1403D). Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.

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RELATED OBJECTS

] 8 LINKED