NGC 3988

NGC 3988 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Leo about 305 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 67,000 ly, about 67% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 6,562 km/s.

Because its light is 305 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3988 as it looked roughly 305 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).