IC 5247

IC 5247 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Tucana about 159 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 63,000 ly, about 63% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 159 million years ago.

Because its light is 159 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5247 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). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).