NGC 7231

NGC 7231 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Lacerta about 49 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 24,000 ly, about 24% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,007 km/s.

Because its light is 49 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 7231 as it looked roughly 49 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).