IC 3109

IC 3109 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 599 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 120,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 599 million years ago.

Because its light is 599 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3109 as it looked roughly 599 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).