NGC 4551

NGC 4551 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 55 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 27,000 ly, about 27% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,189 km/s.

Because its light is 55 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4551 as it looked roughly 55 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).