NGC 3550 NED01

NGC 3550 NED01 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 486 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 120,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 486 million years ago.

Because its light is 486 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3550 NED01 as it looked roughly 486 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).