IC 1249

IC 1249 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Hercules about 522 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 36,000 ly, about 36% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 522 million years ago.

Because its light is 522 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1249 as it looked roughly 522 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).