IC 3017

IC 3017 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 912 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 160,000 ly, about 1.6 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 912 million years ago.

Because its light is 912 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3017 as it looked roughly 912 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).