IC 234

IC 234 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 288 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 58,000 ly, about 58% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 6,015 km/s.

Because its light is 288 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 234 as it looked roughly 288 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).