NGC 6172

NGC 6172 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Serpens about 235 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 62,000 ly, about 62% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 4,979 km/s.

Because its light is 235 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6172 as it looked roughly 235 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).