IC 1224

IC 1224 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Hercules about 474 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 180,000 ly, about 1.8 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 474 million years ago.

Because its light is 474 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1224 as it looked roughly 474 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).