NGC 309

NGC 309 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 263 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 170,000 ly, about 1.7 times the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 5,649 km/s.

Because its light is 263 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 309 as it looked roughly 263 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).