NGC 853

NGC 853 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 72 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 38,000 ly, about 38% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,479 km/s.

Because its light is 72 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 853 as it looked roughly 72 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).