IC 979

IC 979 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 360 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 110,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 7,733 km/s.

Because its light is 360 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 979 as it looked roughly 360 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).