IC 4118

IC 4118 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 521 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 95,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 521 million years ago.

Because its light is 521 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4118 as it looked roughly 521 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).