NGC 681

NGC 681 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 82 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 59,000 ly, about 59% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,754 km/s.

Because its light is 82 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 681 as it looked roughly 82 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).