IC 963

IC 963 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 304 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 57,000 ly, about 57% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 304 million years ago.

Because its light is 304 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 963 as it looked roughly 304 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).