NGC 2697

NGC 2697 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Hydra about 86 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 41,000 ly, about 41% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 86 million years ago.

Because its light is 86 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 2697 as it looked roughly 86 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).