IC 2981

IC 2981 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 160 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 25,000 ly, about 25% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 160 million years ago.

Because its light is 160 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2981 as it looked roughly 160 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).