NGC 4331

NGC 4331 is an irregular galaxy in the constellation Draco about 73 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 73 million years ago.

Because its light is 73 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4331 as it looked roughly 73 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).