IC 4256

IC 4256 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 317 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 317 million years ago.

Because its light is 317 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4256 as it looked roughly 317 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).