IC 1242

IC 1242 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Ophiuchus about 318 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 78,000 ly, about 78% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 318 million years ago.

Because its light is 318 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1242 as it looked roughly 318 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).