IC 4485

IC 4485 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 640 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 120,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 640 million years ago.

Because its light is 640 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4485 as it looked roughly 640 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).