IC 4821

IC 4821 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Telescopium about 127 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 67,000 ly, about 67% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 127 million years ago.

Because its light is 127 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4821 as it looked roughly 127 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).