NGC 6409

NGC 6409 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Draco about 287 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 60,000 ly, about 60% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 287 million years ago.

Because its light is 287 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6409 as it looked roughly 287 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).