IC 5173A

IC 5173A is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Indus about 148 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 78,000 ly, about 78% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 148 million years ago.

Because its light is 148 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5173A as it looked roughly 148 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).