NGC 3278

NGC 3278 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Antlia about 139 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 55,000 ly, about 55% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 139 million years ago.

Because its light is 139 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3278 as it looked roughly 139 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).