IC 2987

IC 2987 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 316 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 55,000 ly, about 55% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 6,913 km/s.

Because its light is 316 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2987 as it looked roughly 316 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).