NGC 1979

NGC 1979 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Lepus about 81 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 45,000 ly, about 45% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 81 million years ago.

Because its light is 81 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 1979 as it looked roughly 81 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).