NGC 6039

NGC 6039 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Hercules about 497 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 140,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 497 million years ago.

Because its light is 497 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6039 as it looked roughly 497 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).