A dazzling new photo from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 3156, a large lenticular galaxy in the minor equatorial constellation of Sextans.
NGC 3156 resides approximately 73 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Sextans.
“Sextans is a small constellation that belongs to the Hercules family of constellations,” Hubble astronomers said.
“It itself is a constellation with an astronomical theme, being named for the instrument known as the sextant.”
“Sextants are often thought of as navigational instruments that were invented in the 18th century.”
“However, the sextant as an astronomical tool has been around for much longer than that: Islamic scholars developed astronomical sextants many hundreds of years earlier in order to measure angles in the sky.”
“A particularly striking example is the enormous sextant with a radius of 36 m that was developed by Ulugh Beg of the Timurid dynasty in the fifteenth century, located in Samarkand in present-day Uzbekistan.”
“These early sextants may have been a development of the quadrant, a measuring device proposed by Ptolemy.”
“A sextant, as the name suggests, is shaped like one-sixth of a circle, approximately the shape of the constellation.”
“Sextants are no longer in use in modern astronomy, having been replaced by instruments that are capable of measuring the positions of stars and astronomical objects much more accurately and precisely.”
NGC 3156 was first discovered by the German-British astronomer William Herschel on December 13, 1784.
Otherwise known as LEDA 29730 or UGC 5503, this galaxy is forming a pair with the spiral galaxy NGC 3169.
NGC 3156 is a member of the NGC 3166 group of galaxies, which is a member of the Leo II groups, a series of galaxies and galaxy clusters strung out from the right edge of the Virgo Supercluster.
“NGC 3156 has been studied in many ways other than determining its precise position — from its cohort of globular clusters, to…
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