NGC 6261

NGC 6261 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Hercules about 491 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 160,000 ly, about 1.6 times the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 10,270 km/s.

Because its light is 491 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6261 as it looked roughly 491 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).