IC 1168

IC 1168 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Serpens about 512 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 200,000 ly, about 2.0 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 512 million years ago.

Because its light is 512 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1168 as it looked roughly 512 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).