IC 4734

IC 4734 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Pavo about 219 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 83,000 ly, about 83% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 219 million years ago.

Because its light is 219 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4734 as it looked roughly 219 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). Recession velocity from RC3 (de Vaucouleurs et al. 1991, via NASA/HEASARC, public domain). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).