NGC 6736

NGC 6736 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Pavo about 200 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 64,000 ly, about 64% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 200 million years ago.

Because its light is 200 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6736 as it looked roughly 200 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).