IC 5027

IC 5027 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Indus about 517 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 77,000 ly, about 77% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 517 million years ago.

Because its light is 517 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5027 as it looked roughly 517 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).