IC 3148

IC 3148 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 116 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 21,000 ly, about 21% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 116 million years ago.

Because its light is 116 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3148 as it looked roughly 116 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).