IC 5181

IC 5181 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Grus about 94 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 72,000 ly, about 72% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,995 km/s.

Because its light is 94 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5181 as it looked roughly 94 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).