IC 978

IC 978 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 76 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 21,000 ly, about 21% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 76 million years ago.

Because its light is 76 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 978 as it looked roughly 76 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).