NGC 6243

NGC 6243 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Hercules about 500 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 180,000 ly, about 1.8 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 500 million years ago.

Because its light is 500 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6243 as it looked roughly 500 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).