NGC 501

NGC 501 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Pisces about 231 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 35,000 ly, about 35% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 4,887 km/s.

Because its light is 231 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 501 as it looked roughly 231 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).