IC 4235

IC 4235 is a galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 252 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 67,000 ly, about 67% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 252 million years ago.

Because its light is 252 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4235 as it looked roughly 252 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).