IC 5278

IC 5278 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Aquarius about 161 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 55,000 ly, about 55% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 161 million years ago.

Because its light is 161 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5278 as it looked roughly 161 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).