NGC 5256 NED01

NGC 5256 NED01 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 399 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 26,000 ly, about 26% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 399 million years ago.

Because its light is 399 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5256 NED01 as it looked roughly 399 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).