NGC 5521

NGC 5521 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 269 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 48,000 ly, about 48% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 12,300 km/s.

Because its light is 269 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5521 as it looked roughly 269 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).