IC 3617

IC 3617 is an irregular galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 97 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 21,000 ly, about 21% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 97 million years ago.

Because its light is 97 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3617 as it looked roughly 97 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). Recession velocity from RC3 (de Vaucouleurs et al. 1991, via NASA/HEASARC, public domain). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).