NGC 6872

NGC 6872 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Pavo about 217 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 300,000 ly, about 3.0 times the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 4,818 km/s.

Because its light is 217 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6872 as it looked roughly 217 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).