NGC 5046

NGC 5046 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 104 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 31,000 ly, about 31% 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 5046 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).