NGC 3901

NGC 3901 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Camelopardalis about 79 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 32,000 ly, about 32% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 79 million years ago.

Because its light is 79 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3901 as it looked roughly 79 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).