IC 3421

IC 3421 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 318 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 64,000 ly, about 64% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 318 million years ago.

Because its light is 318 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3421 as it looked roughly 318 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).