IC 1987 NED02

IC 1987 NED02 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Reticulum about 648 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 150,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 648 million years ago.

Because its light is 648 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1987 NED02 as it looked roughly 648 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).