NGC 1255

NGC 1255 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Fornax about 79 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 93,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 1,714 km/s.

Because its light is 79 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 1255 as it looked roughly 79 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).