IC 2271

IC 2271 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Cancer about 104 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 12,000 ly, about 12% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 104 million years ago.

Because its light is 104 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2271 as it looked roughly 104 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).