Illustration — we do not hold a photograph of this object

Messier 86

Galaxy in Virgo

An object in the observing catalogue.

Also catalogued as M86, NGC 4406

Measurements and positionShow

Position: Right ascension 12h 26m 11.7s Declination +12° 56′ 46″J2000; Where the object sits on the sky, in the coordinate system astronomers use. Right ascension is the east–west figure and declination the north–south one; J2000 names the reference date they are measured against.
Brightness: 8.86; Apparent magnitude. The scale runs backwards — a smaller number is brighter, and around 6 is roughly the faintest the unaided eye can see from a dark site.
Apparent size: 11.5 arcminutes; How large the object looks from here, not how large it is. The full Moon is about 30 arcminutes across, which is a useful thing to compare against.

Catalogue data from OpenNGC (Mattia Verga) · CC-BY-SA-4.0