IC 946

IC 946 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 319 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 83,000 ly, about 83% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 6,843 km/s.

Because its light is 319 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 946 as it looked roughly 319 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).