NGC 6174
ILLUSTRATION FROM HUBBLE TYPE -2 · MAJOR AXIS 0.9′ · AXIS RATIO 0.44 · POSITION ANGLE 120°
OBSERVING
FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see NGC 6174 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 6174 is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECENGC 6174 covers 54″ of sky against a of 1.08°, so at 48× it is a speck in a wide field.
- 48×
- 1.08
- 1.25
- 13.0
- SIZE ON THE SKY
- 54
- FILLS OF THE FIELD
- 1% of the width
NGC 6174 is not a point of light, so the limit above is the wrong one to hold it against: the same brightness spread over 54″ of sky is harder than a star of it, and goes first. 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
- 10.9
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- none published
Computed for 2026-10-24 00:00 UT. No proper motion is published for NGC 6174, 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.
SPECTRUM
ITS OWN LIGHTA galaxy's spectrum is every star in it added together, so the gaps are the ones its commonest stars make. Where a line comes back as a spike instead, gas somewhere in the galaxy is being lit hard enough to glow on its own.
Point at a labelled line — or an element above — to see which atom makes it and where it falls.
- SHIFTED Every line above sits 2.8% redder than the wavelength its atom emits at, because NGC 6174 is receding. The pattern survives it — the whole barcode slides together, which is how the shift is measured in the first place.
SDSS DR18 optical spectra — Sloan Digital Sky Survey, www.sdss.org · spec-0817-52381-0360 · observed 2002-04-17. SDSS fibre, 3 arcseconds across. Resolving power R = 1,500 to 2,500; 3,836 reduced pixels rebinned onto 1,021 log-spaced display points and normalised to the median flux. Brightness is scaled to this spectrum’s own middle value, so the shape is the measurement and the height is not. The 10 lines named above are the ones that stand clear of the scatter and of the features around them; a spectrum at this sampling holds many more that it cannot separate. The samples themselves, as JSON, CSV or VOTable.
CATALOG DATA
8 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
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.
- Major axis
- 0.9
- Minor axis
- 0.40027
- 120
WHEN IT WAS FOUND
Who first saw it, from where, and by what method.
- Discovered by
- George Johnstone Stoney
OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS
The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.
- OpenNGC type code
- GPair
- Wikidata item
- Q1912051
WHERE THESE FIGURES CAME FROM
Which catalogue, paper or model each of the fields above was read from, where the source named one.
- Morphology from
- SIMBAD (2010ApJS..186..427N, quality D)
ALSO KNOWN AS
3 DESIGNATIONS- LEDA LEDA 58351
- NGC NGC 6174
- PGC PGC 58351
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 6174
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- NEDNGC 6174
Redshift-independent distances, photometry across the spectrum and the extragalactic literature.
- ADSobject:"NGC 6174"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR27″ around 247.4487 +40.8720
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 6174 [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/ngc-6174
@misc{spacecatalog_ngc-6174,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{NGC 6174}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/ngc-6174},
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.