IC 1581

IC 1581 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Sculptor about 528 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 150,000 ly, about 1.5 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 528 million years ago.

Because its light is 528 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1581 as it looked roughly 528 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).