IC 1796

IC 1796 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Phoenix about 237 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 74,000 ly, about 74% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 5,073 km/s.

Because its light is 237 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1796 as it looked roughly 237 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).