IC 2973

IC 2973 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 148 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 61,000 ly, about 61% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,199 km/s.

Because its light is 148 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2973 as it looked roughly 148 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).