NGC 2581

NGC 2581 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cancer about 277 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 77,000 ly, about 77% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 277 million years ago.

Because its light is 277 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 2581 as it looked roughly 277 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).