NGC 4257

NGC 4257 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 126 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 17,000 ly, about 17% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 126 million years ago.

Because its light is 126 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4257 as it looked roughly 126 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).