IC 223

IC 223 is an irregular galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 74 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 25,000 ly, about 25% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,600 km/s.

Because its light is 74 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 223 as it looked roughly 74 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).