IC 2608

IC 2608 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo Minor about 78 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 18,000 ly, about 18% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 78 million years ago.

Because its light is 78 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2608 as it looked roughly 78 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).