NGC 5538

NGC 5538 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 327 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 85,000 ly, about 85% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 327 million years ago.

Because its light is 327 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5538 as it looked roughly 327 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).