NGC 4487

NGC 4487 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 48 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 48,000 ly, about 48% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,091 km/s.

Because its light is 48 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4487 as it looked roughly 48 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).