IC 1681

IC 1681 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 177 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 51,000 ly, about 51% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,882 km/s.

Because its light is 177 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1681 as it looked roughly 177 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).