NGC 6215

NGC 6215 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Ara about 73 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 56,000 ly, about 56% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,521 km/s.

Because its light is 73 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6215 as it looked roughly 73 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).