IC 531

IC 531 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Hydra about 244 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 56,000 ly, about 56% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 244 million years ago.

Because its light is 244 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 531 as it looked roughly 244 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).