NGC 5197

NGC 5197 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 298 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 74,000 ly, about 74% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 298 million years ago.

Because its light is 298 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5197 as it looked roughly 298 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).