NGC 5148

NGC 5148 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 312 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 60,000 ly, about 60% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 312 million years ago.

Because its light is 312 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5148 as it looked roughly 312 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).