IC 4249

IC 4249 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Hydra about 88 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 37,000 ly, about 37% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,814 km/s.

Because its light is 88 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4249 as it looked roughly 88 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).