IC 3472

IC 3472 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 322 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 47,000 ly, about 47% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 322 million years ago.

Because its light is 322 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3472 as it looked roughly 322 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).