NGC 997 NED02

NGC 997 NED02 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 303 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 99,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 303 million years ago.

Because its light is 303 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 997 NED02 as it looked roughly 303 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).