NGC 6878

NGC 6878 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius about 272 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 130,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 5,829 km/s.

Because its light is 272 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6878 as it looked roughly 272 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).