NGC 6947

NGC 6947 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Microscopium about 261 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 130,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 5,628 km/s.

Because its light is 261 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6947 as it looked roughly 261 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).