IC 2577

IC 2577 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo Minor about 297 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 60,000 ly, about 60% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 297 million years ago.

Because its light is 297 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2577 as it looked roughly 297 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).