NGC 6241

NGC 6241 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Hercules about 421 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 64,000 ly, about 64% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 421 million years ago.

Because its light is 421 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6241 as it looked roughly 421 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).