IC 4908

IC 4908 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Telescopium about 252 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 48,000 ly, about 48% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 5,350 km/s.

Because its light is 252 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4908 as it looked roughly 252 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).