IC 2951

IC 2951 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo about 285 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 130,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 6,172 km/s.

Because its light is 285 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2951 as it looked roughly 285 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).