NGC 851

NGC 851 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 145 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 48,000 ly, about 48% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,111 km/s.

Because its light is 145 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 851 as it looked roughly 145 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).