IC 2017

IC 2017 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Reticulum about 259 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 84,000 ly, about 84% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 259 million years ago.

Because its light is 259 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2017 as it looked roughly 259 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).