IC 2990

IC 2990 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 316 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 67,000 ly, about 67% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 316 million years ago.

Because its light is 316 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2990 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). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).