NGC 4042

NGC 4042 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 334 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 40,000 ly, about 40% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 334 million years ago.

Because its light is 334 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4042 as it looked roughly 334 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). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).