IC 5259

IC 5259 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Lacerta about 263 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 83,000 ly, about 83% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 263 million years ago.

Because its light is 263 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5259 as it looked roughly 263 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).