IC 2996

IC 2996 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Hydra about 105 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 54,000 ly, about 54% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 105 million years ago.

Because its light is 105 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2996 as it looked roughly 105 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).