NGC 5042

NGC 5042 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Hydra about 65 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 78,000 ly, about 78% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 65 million years ago.

Because its light is 65 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5042 as it looked roughly 65 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).