IC 498

IC 498 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Canis Minor about 473 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 170,000 ly, about 1.7 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 473 million years ago.

Because its light is 473 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 498 as it looked roughly 473 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).