NGC 5122

NGC 5122 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 135 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 45,000 ly, about 45% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 135 million years ago.

Because its light is 135 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5122 as it looked roughly 135 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).