IC 4709

IC 4709 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Telescopium about 236 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 80,000 ly, about 80% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 236 million years ago.

Because its light is 236 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4709 as it looked roughly 236 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).