IC 2426

IC 2426 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Hydra about 181 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 32,000 ly, about 32% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 181 million years ago.

Because its light is 181 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2426 as it looked roughly 181 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).