NGC 2987

NGC 2987 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Sextans about 174 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 66,000 ly, about 66% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,738 km/s.

Because its light is 174 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 2987 as it looked roughly 174 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).