NGC 5997

NGC 5997 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Serpens about 576 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 110,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 576 million years ago.

Because its light is 576 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5997 as it looked roughly 576 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).