OVERVIEW
] GALAXYVirgo Galaxy is an elliptical galaxy E in the constellation Virgo, 53.50 from Earth, shining at apparent magnitude 9.00 (). Other catalogues list it as 2MASX J12304942+1223279, IRAS 12282+1240 and IRAS F12282+1240, among 11 designations in total. It was discovered in 1781.
A giant elliptical galaxy of a trillion stars at the heart of the Virgo Cluster, with a jet of plasma streaming from the black hole at its centre — the first black hole ever imaged.
- WHAT IT IS
- Elliptical galaxy
- HOW FAR
- 53.50
- HOW BIG ON THE SKY
- 7.1
- HOW BRIGHT (V)
A luminosity distance, from its redshift — how faint it looks. The light itself left 58.5 million years ago.
About 0.2 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 E · SURFACE BRIGHTNESS 22.8 MAG/ARCSEC² · MAJOR AXIS 7.11′ · AXIS RATIO 0.94 · POSITION ANGLE 153° · NO SURFACE — DRAWN AS A VOLUME · AXIS RATIO READ AS ITS OWN SHAPE
A spheroid whose brightness falls off as the quarter power of the radius, which is the profile de Vaucouleurs measured for elliptical galaxies and the profile the bulge of every spiral has. The shape of it is the catalogued class; the flattening is the catalogued axis ratio read as the object's own shape rather than as a tilt, because this is not a disc and its ellipticity is not an inclination. Nothing measured the depth, so what is drawn is the roundest object that matches the ellipse the catalogue holds. 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- en:NASA, en:STScI, en:WikiSky
Public domain - NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Public domain - EHT Collaboration
CC BY 4.0 - NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Public domain
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see Virgo 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 Virgo Galaxy is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECEToo faint for your eyes alone. Binoculars reach it. Virgo Galaxy covers 7.1′ 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
- 7.1
- FILLS OF THE FIELD
- 11% of the width
- APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
- 9.00 · within reach
Virgo Galaxy is not a point of light, so the limit above is the wrong one to hold it against: the same brightness spread over 7.1′ of sky is harder than a star of it, and goes first — spread out, it comes to 22.8 . 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
- 21.9
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- none published
Computed for 2026-10-11 00:00 UT. No proper motion is published for Virgo 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
] 18 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
- 22.79
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.
- 1256
- Redshift (z)
- Redshift (z, CMB frame)
- Major axis
- 7.11
- Minor axis
- 6.67
- 153
WHEN IT WAS FOUND
Who first saw it, from where, and by what method.
- Discovered by
- Charles Messier
OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS
The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.
- Also known as
- Virgo A
- OpenNGC type code
- G
- Wikidata item
- Q14041
- Wikipedia article
- Messier 87
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 11 DESIGNATIONS- 2MASX 2MASX J12304942+1223279
- Common name Virgo Galaxy
- IRAS IRAS 12282+1240
- IRAS IRAS F12282+1240
- LEDA LEDA 41361
- MCG MCG +02-32-105
- Messier M 87
- NGC NGC 4486
- PGC PGC 41361
- SDSS SDSS J123049.41+122328.1
- UGC UGC 7654
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 87
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- NEDM 87
Redshift-independent distances, photometry across the spectrum and the extragalactic literature.
- ADSobject:"M 87"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR213″ around 187.7059 +12.3911
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. Virgo Galaxy [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/m87
@misc{spacecatalog_m87,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{Virgo Galaxy}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/m87},
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
] 3 ITEMS- Probing radiation micro-physics in M 87 I. Total intensity and broad-band spectra2026-07-13 · arXiv · PAPER · Christian M. Fromm, Yosuke Mizuno, Ziri Younsi, Ainara Saiz-Perez, Hector Olivares, Antonios Nathanail
- Probing anisotropic particle acceleration and limb-brightening in Centaurus A's jet2026-03-27 · arXiv · PAPER · Felix Glaser, Christian M. Fromm, Luca Ricci, Yosuke Mizuno, Matthias Kadler, Karl Mannheim
- Could the interaction of jet and SN ejecta be the cause of X-ray knots observed in a radio galaxy?2026-03-05 · arXiv · PAPER · Jia-Chun He, Xiao-Na Sun, Hao-Qiang Zhang, Yun-Feng Liang, Hai-Ming Zhang, Da-Bin Lin
arXiv · UPDATED DAILY