NGC 1048

NGC 1048 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 541 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 190,000 ly, about 1.9 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 541 million years ago.

Because its light is 541 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 1048 as it looked roughly 541 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).