IC 1245

IC 1245 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Hercules about 522 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 280,000 ly, about 2.8 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 522 million years ago.

Because its light is 522 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1245 as it looked roughly 522 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).