IC 3597

IC 3597 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 321 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 77,000 ly, about 77% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 321 million years ago.

Because its light is 321 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3597 as it looked roughly 321 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).