NGC 5721

NGC 5721 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 507 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 52,000 ly, about 52% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 507 million years ago.

Because its light is 507 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5721 as it looked roughly 507 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).