IC 4962

IC 4962 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Pavo about 161 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 46,000 ly, about 46% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 161 million years ago.

Because its light is 161 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4962 as it looked roughly 161 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).