IC 5003

IC 5003 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Microscopium about 126 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 87,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 126 million years ago.

Because its light is 126 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5003 as it looked roughly 126 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).