IC 1600

IC 1600 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 546 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 130,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 546 million years ago.

Because its light is 546 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1600 as it looked roughly 546 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).