IC 1491

IC 1491 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Aquarius about 157 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 35,000 ly, about 35% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 157 million years ago.

Because its light is 157 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1491 as it looked roughly 157 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).