NGC 4638

NGC 4638 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 53 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 36,000 ly, about 36% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,132 km/s.

Because its light is 53 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4638 as it looked roughly 53 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).