IC 981

IC 981 is a galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 400 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 100,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 400 million years ago.

Because its light is 400 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 981 as it looked roughly 400 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).