IC 4178

IC 4178 is an irregular galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 55 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 10,000 ly, about 10% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 55 million years ago.

Because its light is 55 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4178 as it looked roughly 55 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).