IC 4518B

IC 4518B is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Lupus about 217 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 217 million years ago.

Because its light is 217 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4518B as it looked roughly 217 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).