NGC 549

NGC 549 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Sculptor about 286 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 49,000 ly, about 49% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 6,163 km/s.

Because its light is 286 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 549 as it looked roughly 286 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).