IC 4961

IC 4961 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Telescopium about 265 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 130,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 5,669 km/s.

Because its light is 265 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4961 as it looked roughly 265 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).