IC 231

IC 231 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 310 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 67,000 ly, about 67% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 310 million years ago.

Because its light is 310 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 231 as it looked roughly 310 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).