NGC 4176

NGC 4176 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 262 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 53,000 ly, about 53% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 262 million years ago.

Because its light is 262 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4176 as it looked roughly 262 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).