NGC 5224

NGC 5224 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 317 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 80,000 ly, about 80% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 317 million years ago.

Because its light is 317 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5224 as it looked roughly 317 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).