IC 178

IC 178 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Andromeda about 225 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 62,000 ly, about 62% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 4,731 km/s.

Because its light is 225 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 178 as it looked roughly 225 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).