IC 2097

IC 2097 is an irregular galaxy in the constellation Eridanus about 232 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 78,000 ly, about 78% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 232 million years ago.

Because its light is 232 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2097 as it looked roughly 232 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).