NGC 3978

NGC 3978 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 463 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 210,000 ly, about 2.1 times the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 9,981 km/s.

Because its light is 463 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3978 as it looked roughly 463 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).