NGC 1021

NGC 1021 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 271 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 62,000 ly, about 62% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 271 million years ago.

Because its light is 271 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 1021 as it looked roughly 271 million years ago. The photons left before that much of history had passed, and are only now reaching us. This distance is estimated from the galaxy's redshift, so the lookback time is approximate.

Source: structural data (position, morphology, brightness, redshift) from OpenNGC (CC BY-SA). Recession velocity from RC3 (de Vaucouleurs et al. 1991, via NASA/HEASARC, public domain). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).