NGC 1998

NGC 1998 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Pictor about 211 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 58,000 ly, about 58% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 211 million years ago.

Because its light is 211 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 1998 as it looked roughly 211 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).