NGC 5431

NGC 5431 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 280 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 73,000 ly, about 73% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 5,744 km/s.

Because its light is 280 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5431 as it looked roughly 280 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).