IC 401

IC 401 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Eridanus about 157 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 80,000 ly, about 80% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,286 km/s.

Because its light is 157 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 401 as it looked roughly 157 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).