IC 2578

IC 2578 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Antlia about 179 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 79,000 ly, about 79% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 179 million years ago.

Because its light is 179 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2578 as it looked roughly 179 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).