IC 3943

IC 3943 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 317 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 85,000 ly, about 85% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 317 million years ago.

Because its light is 317 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3943 as it looked roughly 317 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).