NGC 3451

NGC 3451 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo Minor about 62 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 30,000 ly, about 30% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 62 million years ago.

Because its light is 62 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3451 as it looked roughly 62 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).