IC 5261

IC 5261 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Aquarius about 150 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 63,000 ly, about 63% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,361 km/s.

Because its light is 150 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5261 as it looked roughly 150 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).