IC 2444

IC 2444 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Cancer about 303 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 72,000 ly, about 72% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 6,534 km/s.

Because its light is 303 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2444 as it looked roughly 303 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).