NGC 5143

NGC 5143 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 272 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 42,000 ly, about 42% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 272 million years ago.

Because its light is 272 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5143 as it looked roughly 272 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).