NGC 6836

NGC 6836 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius about 76 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 31,000 ly, about 31% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 76 million years ago.

Because its light is 76 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6836 as it looked roughly 76 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).