IC 1149

IC 1149 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Serpens about 218 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 68,000 ly, about 68% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 4,680 km/s.

Because its light is 218 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1149 as it looked roughly 218 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).