IC 1980

IC 1980 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Reticulum about 68 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 25,000 ly, about 25% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 68 million years ago.

Because its light is 68 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1980 as it looked roughly 68 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).