NGC 491

NGC 491 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Sculptor about 181 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 71,000 ly, about 71% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,885 km/s.

Because its light is 181 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 491 as it looked roughly 181 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).