NGC 6686

NGC 6686 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Lyra about 329 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 329 million years ago.

Because its light is 329 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6686 as it looked roughly 329 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).