IC 856

IC 856 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 189 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 40,000 ly, about 40% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 189 million years ago.

Because its light is 189 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 856 as it looked roughly 189 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).