NGC 6278

NGC 6278 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Hercules about 143 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 72,000 ly, about 72% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 143 million years ago.

Because its light is 143 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6278 as it looked roughly 143 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).