IC 1205

IC 1205 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Hercules about 151 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 30,000 ly, about 30% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 151 million years ago.

Because its light is 151 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1205 as it looked roughly 151 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).