NGC 6303

NGC 6303 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Draco about 566 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 240,000 ly, about 2.4 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 566 million years ago.

Because its light is 566 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6303 as it looked roughly 566 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).