IC 4981

IC 4981 is an irregular galaxy in the constellation Pavo about 179 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 56,000 ly, about 56% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,777 km/s.

Because its light is 179 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4981 as it looked roughly 179 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).