IC 1197

IC 1197 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Serpens about 63 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 47,000 ly, about 47% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 63 million years ago.

Because its light is 63 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1197 as it looked roughly 63 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).