IC 602

IC 602 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo about 176 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 50,000 ly, about 50% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,724 km/s.

Because its light is 176 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 602 as it looked roughly 176 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).