NGC 981

NGC 981 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 212 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 66,000 ly, about 66% 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 981 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). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).