NGC 3638

NGC 3638 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Crater about 330 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 150,000 ly, about 1.5 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 330 million years ago.

Because its light is 330 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3638 as it looked roughly 330 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).