NGC 5304

NGC 5304 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Centaurus about 173 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 96,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 3,730 km/s.

Because its light is 173 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5304 as it looked roughly 173 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).