IC 5123

IC 5123 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Indus about 444 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 190,000 ly, about 1.9 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 444 million years ago.

Because its light is 444 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5123 as it looked roughly 444 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).