IC 3571

IC 3571 is an irregular galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 56 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 9,800 ly, about 10% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 56 million years ago.

Because its light is 56 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3571 as it looked roughly 56 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).