IC 3638

IC 3638 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 301 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 60,000 ly, about 60% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 301 million years ago.

Because its light is 301 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3638 as it looked roughly 301 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).