NGC 6274 NED01

NGC 6274 NED01 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Hercules about 562 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 98,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 562 million years ago.

Because its light is 562 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6274 NED01 as it looked roughly 562 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).