NGC 856

NGC 856 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 280 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 97,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 5,995 km/s.

Because its light is 280 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 856 as it looked roughly 280 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).