IC 1130

IC 1130 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Serpens about 637 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 140,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 637 million years ago.

Because its light is 637 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1130 as it looked roughly 637 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).