NGC 7282

NGC 7282 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Lacerta about 212 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 49,000 ly, about 49% 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 7282 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). 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).