IC 977

IC 977 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 408 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 82,000 ly, about 82% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 408 million years ago.

Because its light is 408 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 977 as it looked roughly 408 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).