NGC 1023

GALAXYElliptical galaxy E-S0

ILLUSTRATION FROM HUBBLE TYPE E-S0 · SURFACE BRIGHTNESS 22.6 MAG/ARCSEC² · MAJOR AXIS 7.4′ · AXIS RATIO 0.41 · POSITION ANGLE 87°

OVERVIEW

GALAXY

NGC 1023 is an elliptical galaxy E-S0 in the constellation Perseus, shining at apparent magnitude 9.47 (). Other catalogues list it as 2MASX J02402401+3903477, LEDA 10123 and MCG +06-06-073, among 6 designations in total. It was discovered in 1786.

WHAT IT IS: Elliptical galaxy
HOW BIG ON THE SKY: 7.4
HOW BRIGHT (V)
WHERE TO LOOK: Perseus

OBSERVING

FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see NGC 1023 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 NGC 1023 is worth going out for.

VIEW IN SKY MAP

THROUGH AN EYEPIECE

150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECE

FIELD 1.08°

Too faint for your eyes alone. Binoculars reach it. NGC 1023 covers 7.4′ 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: 7.4
FILLS OF THE FIELD: 11% of the width
APPARENT MAGNITUDE (): 9.47 · within reach

NGC 1023 is not a point of light, so the limit above is the wrong one to hold it against: the same brightness spread over 7.4′ of sky is harder than a star of it, and goes first — spread out, it comes to 22.6 . 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 J2026.8

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: 20.9
PROPER MOTION SINCE: none published

Computed for 2026-10-26 00:00 UT. No proper motion is published for NGC 1023, 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 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

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: 22.59

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.

: 637
Redshift (z)
Redshift (z, CMB frame)
Major axis: 7.4
Minor axis: 3.06
: 87

WHEN IT WAS FOUND

Who first saw it, from where, and by what method.

Discovered by: 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: Q639434
Wikipedia article: NGC 1023

ALSO KNOWN AS

6 DESIGNATIONS

2MASX 2MASX J02402401+3903477
LEDA LEDA 10123
MCG MCG +06-06-073
NGC NGC 1023
PGC PGC 10123
UGC UGC 2154

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.

SIMBADNGC 1023
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
NEDNGC 1023
Redshift-independent distances, photometry across the spectrum and the extragalactic literature.
ADSobject:"NGC 1023"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
VizieR222″ around 40.1000 +39.0633
Every published table with a row at this position, searched by coordinates rather than by name.

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. NGC 1023 [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/ngc-1023

BIBTEX

@misc{spacecatalog_ngc-1023,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{NGC 1023}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/ngc-1023},
  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.