IC 5008

IC 5008 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Pavo about 172 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 60,000 ly, about 60% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,650 km/s.

Because its light is 172 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5008 as it looked roughly 172 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).