IC 4971

IC 4971 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Pavo about 208 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 55,000 ly, about 55% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 208 million years ago.

Because its light is 208 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4971 as it looked roughly 208 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).