IC 4869

IC 4869 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Pavo about 84 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 44,000 ly, about 44% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 84 million years ago.

Because its light is 84 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4869 as it looked roughly 84 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).