IC 2451

IC 2451 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Cancer about 380 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 100,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 380 million years ago.

Because its light is 380 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2451 as it looked roughly 380 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).