IC 3966

IC 3966 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 389 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 84,000 ly, about 84% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 389 million years ago.

Because its light is 389 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3966 as it looked roughly 389 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).