IC 3159

IC 3159 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 368 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 53,000 ly, about 53% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 368 million years ago.

Because its light is 368 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3159 as it looked roughly 368 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).