IC 3031

IC 3031 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 1.3 billion ly from Earth. It spans roughly 220,000 ly, about 2.2 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 1.3 billion years ago.

Because its light is 1.3 billion ly from home, you are seeing IC 3031 as it looked roughly 1.3 billion 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).