IC 4221

IC 4221 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 136 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 61,000 ly, about 61% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 136 million years ago.

Because its light is 136 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4221 as it looked roughly 136 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).