This galaxy is situated in the northern constellation Draco at RA 15h 06.5, Dec +55d 46' (2000.0). It is the brightest of a remarkable group of galaxies (the NGC 5866 group), lying roughly 40 million light-years distant, which also contains the big bright edge-on spiral NGC 5907, the fainter galaxy NGC 5879, and more very faint galaxies (NGCs 5866A and 5866B, 5862, 5905, 5908 and IC 1099). From the dynamics of that group, E.M. and G.R. Burbidge (ApJ 131, p. 224-226, 1960) have estimated NGC 5866's mass to be about 1 trillion solar masses, so it is a considerably massive galaxy. The 5.2' diameter of NGC 5866 correspondes to about 60,000 light-years, its globular cluster halo extends more far outward.
NGC 5866 is possibly M102.
Our image of NGC 5866 was provided by Stephan Korth. It was taken by Bernd Koch and Stefan Korth, on 12 March 1995 at 1:09 UT with a Celestron 14 at f=4.060mm, located at the Sternwarte Aufderhö.he near Solingen, Germany. The camera was a Starlight XPress, exposure time 5m 28s. Image processing was done with PIXWIN and Corel PhotoPaint by the authors.
Right ascension | 15 : 6.5 (hours : minutes) |
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Declination | +55 : 46 (degrees : minutes) |
Distance | 40000.0 (light-years*10^3) |
Visual magnitude | 9.6-10.0 |