IC 3723

IC 3723 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 251 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 24,000 ly, about 24% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 5,393 km/s.

Because its light is 251 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3723 as it looked roughly 251 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).