IC 3069

IC 3069 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 273 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 40,000 ly, about 40% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 273 million years ago.

Because its light is 273 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3069 as it looked roughly 273 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).