NGC 5551

NGC 5551 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 354 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 83,000 ly, about 83% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 354 million years ago.

Because its light is 354 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5551 as it looked roughly 354 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).