IC 501

IC 501 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Cancer about 348 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 74,000 ly, about 74% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 7,530 km/s.

Because its light is 348 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 501 as it looked roughly 348 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).