NGC 2696

NGC 2696 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Hydra about 609 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 180,000 ly, about 1.8 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 609 million years ago.

Because its light is 609 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 2696 as it looked roughly 609 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).