NGC 1259

NGC 1259 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Perseus about 269 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 74,000 ly, about 74% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 269 million years ago.

Because its light is 269 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 1259 as it looked roughly 269 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). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).