NGC 3142

NGC 3142 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Sextans about 247 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 62,000 ly, about 62% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 247 million years ago.

Because its light is 247 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3142 as it looked roughly 247 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). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).