M98 (Galaxy)
A spiral galaxy in Coma Berenices seen nearly edge-on, 4.2 times as long as it is wide. Dust reddens the light of its small, bright centre.
Galaxy in Coma Berenices. Magnitude 10.8.
Can you see it from Guyana?
From Georgetown (6.8° N) it climbs to 82° above the northern horizon at its highest; from Lethem (3.4° N), to 79° above the northern horizon. It is highest at midnight on the night of 23 Mar, in the middle of its season. The page works out tonight's rise, highest point and set for both towns in Guyana time (UTC-4), and where the Moon is.
What you'll see
- Your eyes: Not visible to the eye. It lies 6.0° east of Denebola.
- 10x50 binoculars: Not visible in binoculars.
- A small telescope (80 to 100 mm): A long, thin streak with a brighter middle; M99 is 1.3° to the east.
- A camera: Tiny on camera: it needs 2,000 mm or more of focal length on a tracking mount.
How big, how bright, how far
- Size on the sky: 11′ × 2.7′, 35% of the Moon's width (the Moon is about 31′ wide).
- Brightness: magnitude 10.8. Fainter than the faintest stars in Georgetown (4.3) and Lethem (6.0): binoculars or a telescope.
- Distance: 40 million light-years. The light reaching your eye left it about 40 million years ago.
- True size: 140,000 light-years across its catalogued outline; light crosses it in 140,000 years.
Apparent size from OpenNGC (Mattia Verga), CC-BY-SA-4.0.
What it is made of
- Type
- Spiral galaxy, nearly edge-on
- Notable
- Nearly edge-on and dusty: the dust reddens its small bright nucleus, and new star-forming regions show as blue knots.
What is in it, not measured:
- Stars: an older central bulge and a disc of younger stars
- Gas and dust: in the spiral arms, where new stars form
- Dark matter: inferred from how fast it spins
How we know: Distance from the median of 22 published estimates by several methods (no two direct ones agree to combine): NED-D (NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, redshift-independent distances), median of 22 estimates: 13.55 Mpc, 11.54-17.42 Mpc (16th-84th percentile); e.g. 2016AJ....152...50T, 2009AJ....138..323T, 2002ApJ...565..681R; retrieved 2026-10-21. True size: the apparent size times the distance (apparent size: OpenNGC (Mattia Verga, CC BY-SA 4.0), commit 4e2398a2).
More deep-sky objects: Coma Pinwheel (M99) · M100 (Galaxy) · M84 (Galaxy) · M86 (Galaxy) · M85 (Galaxy) · M88 (Galaxy)