IC 1999

IC 1999 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Reticulum about 800 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 180,000 ly, about 1.8 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 800 million years ago.

Because its light is 800 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1999 as it looked roughly 800 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).