IC 4905

IC 4905 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Pavo about 746 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 230,000 ly, about 2.3 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 746 million years ago.

Because its light is 746 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4905 as it looked roughly 746 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).