How far is the nearest galaxy?

Travel Time from the Earth

Destination	Jet (600 mi/hr)	Rocket (25,000 mi/hr)	Sunbeam (186,000 mi/sec)
Moon	16.5 days	9.4 hr	1.2 sec
Sun	17 years 8 months	4 months	8.5 min
Mercury	10 years 10 months	3 months	5 min
Venus	5 years 5 months	1.5 months	2.5 min
Mars	8 years 10 months	2.5 months	4 min
Jupiter	74 uears 3 months	1 year 9 months	35 min
Saturn	150 years 5 months	3 years 7 months	1 hr 11 min
Uranus	318 years 6 months	7 years 7 months	2 hr 30 min
Pluto	690 years 1 month	16 years 5 months	5 hr 25 min
Alpha Centauri	4.8 million years	114,155.2 years	4.2 years
Sirius	9.6 million years	228,310.4 years	8.4 years
Pleiades Cluster	----------	----------	400 years
Crab Nebula	----------	----------	4000 years
Center of the Milky Way	------------	----------	38,000 years
Andromda Galaxy	------------	----------	2.2 million years

The table above is much more than a chart of travel time, it represents a glimpse into the past. When you look into the night sky you are looking into the history of the universe. The sunlight that shines on us is 8.5 minutes old when it reaches Earth. Sunlight reflected from Pluto takes 5.5 hours to reach the astronomer's telescope. When the light of Sirius hits your eye, those photons have been traveling for over 8 years through space. This means you are seeing that star not as it is toniht but as it was over 8 years ago. And most of the stars we see in the sky are hundreds or thousands of light years away. The Andormeda galaxy, at a mere 2.2 million light years, is truly a next door neighbor. All of the other galaxies are millions upon millions of light years distant. And that's how big the universe is.

The numbers are only rough estimates and assume the celestial bodies are not in motion for the sake of ease of calculation.