NGC 1542

NGC 1542 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Taurus about 173 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 62,000 ly, about 62% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,537 km/s.

Because its light is 173 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 1542 as it looked roughly 173 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).