NGC 5991

NGC 5991 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Serpens about 317 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 92,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 317 million years ago.

Because its light is 317 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5991 as it looked roughly 317 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).