NGC 3996

NGC 3996 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo about 323 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 78,000 ly, about 78% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 6,989 km/s.

Because its light is 323 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3996 as it looked roughly 323 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).