IC 3306

IC 3306 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 696 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 190,000 ly, about 1.9 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 696 million years ago.

Because its light is 696 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3306 as it looked roughly 696 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).