NGC 4981

NGC 4981 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 78 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 61,000 ly, about 61% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,715 km/s.

Because its light is 78 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4981 as it looked roughly 78 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).