IC 2979

IC 2979 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 143 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 35,000 ly, about 35% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,122 km/s.

Because its light is 143 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2979 as it looked roughly 143 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).