IC 3378

IC 3378 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 632 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 99,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 632 million years ago.

Because its light is 632 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3378 as it looked roughly 632 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).