NGC 6999

NGC 6999 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Microscopium about 522 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 180,000 ly, about 1.8 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 522 million years ago.

Because its light is 522 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6999 as it looked roughly 522 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).