IC 56

IC 56 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 284 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 68,000 ly, about 68% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 6,090 km/s.

Because its light is 284 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 56 as it looked roughly 284 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).