IC 4598

IC 4598 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Scorpius about 172 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 73,000 ly, about 73% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 172 million years ago.

Because its light is 172 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4598 as it looked roughly 172 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).