IC 3852

IC 3852 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 204 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 65,000 ly, about 65% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 204 million years ago.

Because its light is 204 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3852 as it looked roughly 204 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).