IC 2977

IC 2977 is an irregular galaxy in the constellation Centaurus about 139 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 86,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 3,010 km/s.

Because its light is 139 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2977 as it looked roughly 139 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).