NGC 2501

NGC 2501 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Puppis about 102 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 51,000 ly, about 51% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 102 million years ago.

Because its light is 102 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 2501 as it looked roughly 102 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).