NGC 5542

NGC 5542 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 360 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 63,000 ly, about 63% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 360 million years ago.

Because its light is 360 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5542 as it looked roughly 360 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).