NGC 838

NGC 838 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 179 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 70,000 ly, about 70% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,841 km/s.

Because its light is 179 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 838 as it looked roughly 179 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).