NGC 4297

NGC 4297 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 183 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 34,000 ly, about 34% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 183 million years ago.

Because its light is 183 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4297 as it looked roughly 183 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).