NGC 5040

NGC 5040 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 351 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 110,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 351 million years ago.

Because its light is 351 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5040 as it looked roughly 351 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). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).