NGC 3171

NGC 3171 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Hydra about 162 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 88,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 3,470 km/s.

Because its light is 162 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3171 as it looked roughly 162 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).