NGC 6257

NGC 6257 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Hercules about 219 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 55,000 ly, about 55% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 219 million years ago.

Because its light is 219 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6257 as it looked roughly 219 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).