NGC 5973

NGC 5973 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Libra about 169 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 45,000 ly, about 45% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 169 million years ago.

Because its light is 169 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5973 as it looked roughly 169 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).