NGC 688

NGC 688 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Triangulum about 195 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 50,000 ly, about 50% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 4,111 km/s.

Because its light is 195 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 688 as it looked roughly 195 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).