IC 4388

IC 4388 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Centaurus about 190 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 63,000 ly, about 63% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 190 million years ago.

Because its light is 190 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4388 as it looked roughly 190 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).