NGC 5096 NED02

NGC 5096 NED02 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 550 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 550 million years ago.

Because its light is 550 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5096 NED02 as it looked roughly 550 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).