NGC 2836

NGC 2836 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Carina about 79 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 38,000 ly, about 38% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 79 million years ago.

Because its light is 79 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 2836 as it looked roughly 79 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).