NGC 3421

NGC 3421 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Hydra about 208 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 96,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 208 million years ago.

Because its light is 208 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3421 as it looked roughly 208 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).