IC 3786

IC 3786 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 768 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 76,000 ly, about 76% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 768 million years ago.

Because its light is 768 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3786 as it looked roughly 768 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).