IC 1302

IC 1302 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cygnus about 216 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 60,000 ly, about 60% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 4,575 km/s.

Because its light is 216 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1302 as it looked roughly 216 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).