IC 3665

IC 3665 is an irregular galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 56 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 13,000 ly, about 13% 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 3665 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). 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).