IC 4500

IC 4500 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 197 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 32,000 ly, about 32% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 197 million years ago.

Because its light is 197 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4500 as it looked roughly 197 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).