IC 4558

IC 4558 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Serpens about 472 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 62,000 ly, about 62% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 472 million years ago.

Because its light is 472 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4558 as it looked roughly 472 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).