NGC 6291

NGC 6291 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Draco about 242 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 44,000 ly, about 44% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 242 million years ago.

Because its light is 242 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6291 as it looked roughly 242 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).