NGC 279

NGC 279 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 181 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 74,000 ly, about 74% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,889 km/s.

Because its light is 181 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 279 as it looked roughly 181 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).