NGC 3172

Polarissima Borealis is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Ursa Minor about 284 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 94,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 284 million years ago.

Because its light is 284 million ly from home, you are seeing Polarissima Borealis as it looked roughly 284 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).