IC 138

IC 138 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 216 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 70,000 ly, about 70% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 4,581 km/s.

Because its light is 216 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 138 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).