NGC 5655

NGC 5655 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 242 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 51,000 ly, about 51% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 242 million years ago.

Because its light is 242 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5655 as it looked roughly 242 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).