NGC 5038

NGC 5038 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 104 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 54,000 ly, about 54% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 104 million years ago.

Because its light is 104 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5038 as it looked roughly 104 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).