IC 5178

IC 5178 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Aquarius about 248 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 75,000 ly, about 75% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 5,318 km/s.

Because its light is 248 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5178 as it looked roughly 248 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).