NGC 5990

NGC 5990 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Serpens about 175 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 81,000 ly, about 81% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,842 km/s.

Because its light is 175 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5990 as it looked roughly 175 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).