IC 2249

IC 2249 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Cancer about 415 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 37,000 ly, about 37% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 415 million years ago.

Because its light is 415 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2249 as it looked roughly 415 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).