NGC 4597

NGC 4597 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 48 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 50,000 ly, about 50% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 48 million years ago.

Because its light is 48 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4597 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).