IC 208

IC 208 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 168 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 64,000 ly, about 64% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,449 km/s.

Because its light is 168 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 208 as it looked roughly 168 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).