NGC 638

NGC 638 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Pisces about 155 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 42,000 ly, about 42% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,123 km/s.

Because its light is 155 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 638 as it looked roughly 155 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).