NGC 178

NGC 178 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 68 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 42,000 ly, about 42% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,485 km/s.

Because its light is 68 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 178 as it looked roughly 68 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).