IC 2551

IC 2551 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo about 296 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 65,000 ly, about 65% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 6,335 km/s.

Because its light is 296 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2551 as it looked roughly 296 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).