NGC 5144 NED02

NGC 5144 NED02 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Minor about 145 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 145 million years ago.

Because its light is 145 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5144 NED02 as it looked roughly 145 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).