NGC 6961

NGC 6961 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Aquarius about 173 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 38,000 ly, about 38% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,794 km/s.

Because its light is 173 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6961 as it looked roughly 173 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).