At a distance of 53 million light-years, it is one of the closer members of the Fornax Cluster.

It has a magnitude of 10.8, which makes NGC 1387 one of the brighter galaxies in the Fornax Cluster and it is 60 000 light-years across.

[1] NGC 1387 is an early-type galaxy with a Hubble classification of (R')SAB(s)0.

Observations in 2006 discovered a large nuclear ring around NGC 1387, in a bulge-subtracted 2.2 micron image.

Very little star formation occurs in these galaxies; the lack of star formation in elliptical galaxies appears to start at the center and then slowly propagates outward.