OVERVIEW
] GALAXYSombrero Galaxy is a spiral galaxy Sa in the constellation Virgo, 29.50 from Earth, shining at apparent magnitude 8.59 (). Other catalogues list it as 2MASX J12395949-1137230, HD 110124 and IRAS 12373-1120, among 12 designations in total. It was discovered in 1781.
Seen nearly edge-on, a brilliant bulge cut by a knife-sharp dust lane. The shape earned it a hat's name and one of astronomy's most reproduced photographs.
- WHAT IT IS
- Spiral galaxy
- HOW FAR
- 29.50
- HOW BIG ON THE SKY
- 8.4
- HOW BRIGHT (V)
A luminosity distance, from its redshift — how faint it looks. The light itself left 50.7 million years ago.
About 0.3 of the full Moon's width.
Binoculars reach it; the naked eye does not.
THE MODEL
] LIGHT ALONG THE RAYCALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · ANGULAR SIZE AT THE CATALOGUED DISTANCE · HUBBLE TYPE Sa · SURFACE BRIGHTNESS 22.3 MAG/ARCSEC² · MAJOR AXIS 8.45′ · AXIS RATIO 0.58 · POSITION ANGLE 90° · 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.
IMAGES
] 4 FRAMES- ESA/Hubble & NASA, K. Noll
CC BY 4.0 - NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Public domain - NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
CC BY 4.0 - NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Public domain
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see Sombrero Galaxy 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.
Say where you are, and this line says when Sombrero Galaxy is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECEToo faint for your eyes alone. Binoculars reach it. Sombrero Galaxy covers 8.4′ of sky against a of 1.08°, so at 48× it is a small patch, centred.
- 48×
- 1.08
- 1.25
- 13.0
- SIZE ON THE SKY
- 8.4
- FILLS OF THE FIELD
- 13% of the width
- APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
- 8.59 · within reach
Sombrero Galaxy is not a point of light, so the limit above is the wrong one to hold it against: the same brightness spread over 8.4′ of sky is harder than a star of it, and goes first — spread out, it comes to 22.3 . Catalogued sizes are measured to a photographic contour, and the part an eye sees is usually smaller.
APPARENT PLACE
] EQUINOX J2026.8Where 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
- 22.4
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- none published
Computed for 2026-10-11 00:00 UT. No proper motion is published for Sombrero Galaxy, 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. The catalogue it came from publishes no error for that position, so nothing here says how far this arithmetic can be trusted — the digits above are as precise as the place they were computed from, and no more. Aberration, parallax and refraction are left out. Aberration swings every position by up to twenty arcseconds over a year; parallax stays under an arcsecond for all but the nearest stars; refraction is nothing overhead and about half a degree at the horizon, where it answers to the air, not the sky. The same figure for any date.
CATALOG DATA
] 17 FIELDSThe 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
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 ()
- Apparent magnitude ()
- Apparent magnitude ()
- Apparent magnitude ( band)
- Apparent magnitude ()
- Surface brightness
- 22.26
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.
- 1090
- Redshift (z)
- Redshift (z, CMB frame)
- Major axis
- 8.45
- Minor axis
- 4.91
- 90
WHEN IT WAS FOUND
Who first saw it, from where, and by what method.
- Discovered by
- Pierre Méchain, William Herschel
OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS
The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.
- OpenNGC type code
- G
- Wikidata item
- Q91461627
- Wikipedia article
- Sombrero Galaxy
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 12 DESIGNATIONS- 2MASX 2MASX J12395949-1137230
- Common name Sombrero Galaxy
- HD HD 110124
- IRAS IRAS 12373-1120
- IRAS IRAS 12373-1121
- IRAS IRAS F12374-1120
- LEDA LEDA 42407
- MCG MCG -02-32-020
- Messier M 104
- NGC NGC 4594
- PGC PGC 42407
- UGCA UGCA 293
LOOK IT UP ELSEWHERE
] 4 SERVICESEach 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.
- SIMBADM 104
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- NEDM 104
Redshift-independent distances, photometry across the spectrum and the extragalactic literature.
- ADSobject:"M 104"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR253″ around 189.9976 -11.6231
Every published table with a row at this position, searched by coordinates rather than by name.
CITE THIS PAGE
] DR1This 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.
SpaceCatalog. Sombrero Galaxy [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/m104
@misc{spacecatalog_m104,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{Sombrero Galaxy}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/m104},
note = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from OpenNGC.}
}The values above were taken from OpenNGC — CC-BY-SA-4.0. Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue, and its licence is share-alike: the terms reach whatever you build from these rows.
That catalogue asks for this acknowledgement: OpenNGC, Mattia Verga (github.com/mattiaverga/OpenNGC). Fields derived from it stay under CC BY-SA 4.0.
RECENT ACTIVITY
] 6 ITEMS- NASA Science2026-10-06 · NASA APOD · IMAGE
- NASA Science2026-10-05 · NASA APOD · IMAGE
- APOD: 2026 October 5 – M104: The Sombrero Galaxy’s Tidal Streams2026-10-05 · NASA · MISSION UPDATE
- Distance measurements from the internal dynamics of globular clusters: Application to the Sombrero galaxy (M104)2025-09-18 · arXiv · PAPER · Katja Fahrion, Michael A. Beasley, Anastasia Gvozdenko, Glenn van de Ven, Katherine L. Rhode, Ana L. Chies-Santos
- Globular clusters in M104: Tracing kinematics and metallicities from the centre to the halo2025-08-13 · arXiv · PAPER · Katja Fahrion, Michael A. Beasley, Eric Emsellem, Anastasia Gvozdenko, Oliver Müller, Marina Rejkuba
- Multifrequency Very Long Baseline Interferometry Imaging of the Subparsec-scale Jet in the Sombrero Galaxy (M104)2024-03-07 · arXiv · PAPER · Xi Yan, Ru-Sen Lu, Wu Jiang, Thomas P. Krichbaum, Fu-Guo Xie, Zhi-Qiang Shen
NASA APOD · NASA · arXiv · UPDATED DAILY