IC 4786

IC 4786 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Telescopium about 234 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 54,000 ly, about 54% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 234 million years ago.

Because its light is 234 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4786 as it looked roughly 234 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).