IC 5179

IC 5179 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Grus about 159 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 47,000 ly, about 47% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,407 km/s.

Because its light is 159 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5179 as it looked roughly 159 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).