IC 4811

IC 4811 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Pavo about 218 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 39,000 ly, about 39% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 218 million years ago.

Because its light is 218 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4811 as it looked roughly 218 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).