IC 1226

IC 1226 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Hercules about 248 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 41,000 ly, about 41% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 248 million years ago.

Because its light is 248 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1226 as it looked roughly 248 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).