IC 216

IC 216 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 139 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 20,000 ly, about 20% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 139 million years ago.

Because its light is 139 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 216 as it looked roughly 139 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).