NGC 996

NGC 996 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Andromeda about 215 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 81,000 ly, about 81% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 215 million years ago.

Because its light is 215 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 996 as it looked roughly 215 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).