IC 4771

IC 4771 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Pavo about 262 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 84,000 ly, about 84% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 4,838 km/s.

Because its light is 262 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4771 as it looked roughly 262 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).