NGC 4538

NGC 4538 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 218 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 45,000 ly, about 45% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 5,100 km/s.

Because its light is 218 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4538 as it looked roughly 218 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).