NGC 4947A

NGC 4947A is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Centaurus about 121 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 45,000 ly, about 45% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 121 million years ago.

Because its light is 121 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4947A as it looked roughly 121 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).