NGC 1242

NGC 1242 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Eridanus about 175 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 54,000 ly, about 54% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,938 km/s.

Because its light is 175 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 1242 as it looked roughly 175 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).