IC 4284

IC 4284 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 853 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 79,000 ly, about 79% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 853 million years ago.

Because its light is 853 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4284 as it looked roughly 853 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).