IC 849

IC 849 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 253 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 75,000 ly, about 75% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 5,399 km/s.

Because its light is 253 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 849 as it looked roughly 253 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).