NGC 5996

NGC 5996 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Serpens about 158 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 69,000 ly, about 69% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,297 km/s.

Because its light is 158 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5996 as it looked roughly 158 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).