NGC 472

NGC 472 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Pisces about 246 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 65,000 ly, about 65% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 246 million years ago.

Because its light is 246 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 472 as it looked roughly 246 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). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).