NGC 6697

NGC 6697 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Hercules about 218 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 75,000 ly, about 75% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 218 million years ago.

Because its light is 218 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6697 as it looked roughly 218 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).