IC 2497

IC 2497 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo Minor about 698 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 150,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 698 million years ago.

Because its light is 698 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2497 as it looked roughly 698 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).