NGC 6985

NGC 6985 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Aquarius about 261 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 95,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 261 million years ago.

Because its light is 261 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6985 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). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).