IC 3387

IC 3387 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 701 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 71,000 ly, about 71% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 701 million years ago.

Because its light is 701 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3387 as it looked roughly 701 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).