IC 3259

IC 3259 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 66 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 32,000 ly, about 32% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,593 km/s.

Because its light is 66 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3259 as it looked roughly 66 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).