NGC 4253

NGC 4253 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 178 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 46,000 ly, about 46% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,819 km/s.

Because its light is 178 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4253 as it looked roughly 178 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).