IC 1640

IC 1640 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 258 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 14,000 ly, about 14% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 258 million years ago.

Because its light is 258 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1640 as it looked roughly 258 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).