IC 2421

IC 2421 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cancer about 204 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 84,000 ly, about 84% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 4,389 km/s.

Because its light is 204 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2421 as it looked roughly 204 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).