NGC 6988

NGC 6988 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Delphinus about 212 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 42,000 ly, about 42% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 212 million years ago.

Because its light is 212 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6988 as it looked roughly 212 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).