NGC 1553
ILLUSTRATION FROM HUBBLE TYPE S0 · SURFACE BRIGHTNESS 23.0 MAG/ARCSEC² · MAJOR AXIS 6.25′ · AXIS RATIO 0.69 · POSITION ANGLE 150°
OVERVIEW
] GALAXYNGC 1553 is a lenticular galaxy S0 in the constellation Dorado, 55.82 from Earth, shining at apparent magnitude 9.31 (). Other catalogues list it as 2MASX J04161046-5546485, ESO 157-017 and ESO 157-17, among 9 designations in total. It was discovered in 1834.
- WHAT IT IS
- Lenticular galaxy
- HOW FAR
- 55.82
- HOW BIG ON THE SKY
- 6.3
- HOW BRIGHT (V)
A luminosity distance, from its redshift — how faint it looks. The light itself left 56.1 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 S0 · SURFACE BRIGHTNESS 23.0 MAG/ARCSEC² · MAJOR AXIS 6.25′ · AXIS RATIO 0.69 · POSITION ANGLE 150° · NO SURFACE — DRAWN AS A VOLUME · AXIS RATIO READ AS AN INCLINATION
A disc and a bulge and no arms, because a lenticular has none — that absence is what the classification is. 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 AREWhat it takes to see NGC 1553 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 NGC 1553 is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECEToo faint for your eyes alone. Binoculars reach it. NGC 1553 covers 6.3′ 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
- 6.3
- FILLS OF THE FIELD
- 10% of the width
- APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
- 9.31 · within reach
NGC 1553 is not a point of light, so the limit above is the wrong one to hold it against: the same brightness spread over 6.3′ of sky is harder than a star of it, and goes first — spread out, it comes to 23.0 . 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
- 6.4
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- none published
Computed for 2026-10-12 00:00 UT. No proper motion is published for NGC 1553, 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
- 22.99
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.
- 1205
- Redshift (z)
- Redshift (z, CMB frame)
- Major axis
- 6.25
- Minor axis
- 4.29
- 150
WHEN IT WAS FOUND
Who first saw it, from where, and by what method.
- Discovered by
- John Frederick 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
- Q944003
- Wikipedia article
- NGC 1553
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 9 DESIGNATIONS- 2MASX 2MASX J04161046-5546485
- ESO ESO 157-017
- ESO ESO 157-17
- ESO-LV ESO-LV 157-0170
- IRAS IRAS 04150-5554
- IRAS IRAS F04150-5554
- LEDA LEDA 14765
- NGC NGC 1553
- PGC PGC 14765
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.
- SIMBADNGC 1553
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- NEDNGC 1553
Redshift-independent distances, photometry across the spectrum and the extragalactic literature.
- ADSobject:"NGC 1553"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR188″ around 64.0436 -55.7801
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. NGC 1553 [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/ngc-1553
@misc{spacecatalog_ngc-1553,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{NGC 1553}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/ngc-1553},
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.