PGC 46859
ILLUSTRATION FROM HUBBLE TYPE 3 · MAJOR AXIS 1.4′ · AXIS RATIO 0.33 · POSITION ANGLE 173°
OVERVIEW
] GALAXYPGC 46859 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo, 300.3 from Earth, shining at apparent magnitude 15.02 (). It is catalogued as 2MASX 13242415+1356152 and WISExSCOS J132424.18+135614.9.
- WHAT IT IS
- Spiral galaxy
- HOW FAR
- 300.3
- HOW BIG ON THE SKY
- 1.4
- HOW BRIGHT (B)
The light arriving now left it that long ago.
Small enough that the full Moon would cover it several times over.
Faint: it takes a large telescope.
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see PGC 46859 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 PGC 46859 is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECEFainter than the largest telescope modelled here reaches. PGC 46859 covers 1.4′ 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
- 1.4
- FILLS OF THE FIELD
- 2% of the width
- APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
- 15.02 · too faint for this
PGC 46859 is not a point of light, so the limit above is the wrong one to hold it against: the same brightness spread over 1.4′ 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 J2026.7Where 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
- 21.0
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- none published
Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. No proper motion is published for PGC 46859, 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.
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 2.3% redder than the wavelength its atom emits at, because PGC 46859 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 · spec-1774-53759-0166 · observed 2006-01-24. SDSS fibre, 3 arcseconds across. Resolving power R = 1,500 to 2,500; 3,824 reduced pixels rebinned onto 1,022 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
] 12 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 IT IS MADE OF
What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.
- Hubble type
- Stellar mass
- 1.03×10¹⁰ ±4.7×10⁹
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 ( band)
- Apparent magnitude ()
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.
- Redshift (z)
- Redshift (z, CMB frame)
- Major axis
- 1.40024
- Minor axis
- 0.459559
- 173
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 (2005ApJS..160..149S, quality D)
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 3 DESIGNATIONS- 2MASX 2MASX 13242415+1356152
- PGC PGC 46859
- WISExSCOS WISExSCOS J132424.18+135614.9
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.
- SIMBADPGC 46859
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- NEDPGC 46859
Redshift-independent distances, photometry across the spectrum and the extragalactic literature.
- ADSobject:"PGC 46859"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR42″ around 201.1006 +13.9376
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. PGC 46859 [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/pgc-46859
@misc{spacecatalog_pgc-46859,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{PGC 46859}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/pgc-46859},
note = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from GLADE+ (Galaxy List for the Advanced Detector Era).}
}The values above were taken from GLADE+ (Galaxy List for the Advanced Detector Era) — VizieR terms; cite Dalya+ 2022 (2022MNRAS.514.1403D). Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.