IC 1131

IC 1131 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Serpens about 93 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 23,000 ly, about 23% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 93 million years ago.

Because its light is 93 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1131 as it looked roughly 93 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).