IC 2518

IC 2518 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Leo Minor about 238 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 49,000 ly, about 49% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 238 million years ago.

Because its light is 238 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2518 as it looked roughly 238 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).