IC 893

IC 893 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 283 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 83,000 ly, about 83% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 283 million years ago.

Because its light is 283 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 893 as it looked roughly 283 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).