NGC 597

NGC 597 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Sculptor about 238 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 91,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 5,072 km/s.

Because its light is 238 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 597 as it looked roughly 238 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). Recession velocity from RC3 (de Vaucouleurs et al. 1991, via NASA/HEASARC, public domain). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).