IC 3843

IC 3843 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 489 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 70,000 ly, about 70% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 489 million years ago.

Because its light is 489 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3843 as it looked roughly 489 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).