IC 761

IC 761 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Corvus about 257 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 75,000 ly, about 75% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 257 million years ago.

Because its light is 257 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 761 as it looked roughly 257 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).