OVERVIEW
] GALAXYCigar Galaxy is a spiral galaxy S? in the constellation Ursa Major, 11.50 from Earth, shining at apparent magnitude 8.30 (). Other catalogues list it as 2MASX J09555243+6940469, IRAS 09517+6954 and IRAS F09517+6954, among 11 designations in total. It was discovered in 1774.
A starburst galaxy forming stars ten times faster than the Milky Way, with superwinds of hot gas erupting from its core — the aftermath of a close pass by M81.
- WHAT IT IS
- Spiral galaxy
- HOW FAR
- 11.50
- HOW BIG ON THE SKY
- 11.0
- HOW BRIGHT (V)
The light arriving now left it that long ago.
About 0.4 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 S? · SURFACE BRIGHTNESS 22.2 MAG/ARCSEC² · MAJOR AXIS 11′ · AXIS RATIO 0.46 · POSITION ANGLE 66° · 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- NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Public domain - NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/CXC/UofA/ESA/AURA/JHU
Public domain - NASA/SOFIA/E. Lopez-Rodiguez; NASA/Spitzer/J. Moustakas et al.
Public domain - NASA/CXC/SAO/PSU/CMU
Public domain
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see Cigar 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 Cigar Galaxy is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECEToo faint for your eyes alone. Binoculars reach it. Cigar Galaxy covers 11.0′ of sky against a of 1.08°, so at 48× it is comfortably framed.
- 48×
- 1.08
- 1.25
- 13.0
- SIZE ON THE SKY
- 11.0
- FILLS OF THE FIELD
- 17% of the width
- APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
- 8.30 · within reach
Cigar Galaxy is not a point of light, so the limit above is the wrong one to hold it against: the same brightness spread over 11.0′ of sky is harder than a star of it, and goes first — spread out, it comes to 22.2 . Catalogued sizes are measured to a photographic contour, and the part an eye sees is usually smaller.
APPARENT PLACE
] EQUINOX J2026.7Where 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
- 13.9
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- none published
Computed for 2026-09-07 00:00 UT. No proper motion is published for Cigar 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. 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.
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
- 22.22
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.
- 219
- Redshift (z)
- Redshift (z, CMB frame)
- Major axis
- 10.99
- Minor axis
- 5.11
- 66
WHEN IT WAS FOUND
Who first saw it, from where, and by what method.
- Discovered by
- Johann Elert Bode
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
- Q14026
- Wikipedia article
- Messier 82
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 11 DESIGNATIONS- 2MASX 2MASX J09555243+6940469
- Common name Cigar Galaxy
- IRAS IRAS 09517+6954
- IRAS IRAS F09517+6954
- LEDA LEDA 28655
- MCG MCG +12-10-011
- Messier M 82
- NGC NGC 3034
- PGC PGC 28655
- SDSS SDSS J095551.73+694048.6
- UGC UGC 5322
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 82
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- NEDM 82
Redshift-independent distances, photometry across the spectrum and the extragalactic literature.
- ADSobject:"M 82"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR330″ around 148.9697 +69.6794
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. Cigar Galaxy [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/m82
@misc{spacecatalog_m82,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{Cigar Galaxy}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/m82},
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.
RECENT ACTIVITY
] 4 ITEMS- Webb pinpoints millions of stars within Cigar Galaxy2026-06-23 · ESA/Webb · IMAGE
- A multi-wavelength study of nearby starburst galaxy M 822026-02-24 · arXiv · PAPER · Nilkanth Vagshette, Satish S. Sonkamble, Madhav Patil, Sachindra Naik, Ilani Loubser
- Dense gas properties and star formation in M 822025-09-15 · arXiv · PAPER · Fei Li, Zhi-Yu Zhang, Junzhi Wang, Gan Luo
- JWST Observations of Starbursts: Relations between PAH features and CO clouds in the starburst galaxy M 822025-01-24 · arXiv · PAPER · V. Villanueva, A. D. Bolatto, R. Herrera-Camus, A. Leroy, D. B. Fisher, R. C. Levy
ESA/Webb · arXiv · UPDATED DAILY