IC 2946

IC 2946 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 457 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 61,000 ly, about 61% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 457 million years ago.

Because its light is 457 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2946 as it looked roughly 457 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).