IC 646

IC 646 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 651 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 160,000 ly, about 1.6 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 651 million years ago.

Because its light is 651 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 646 as it looked roughly 651 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). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).