IC 259

IC 259 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Perseus about 256 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 51,000 ly, about 51% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 6,178 km/s.

Because its light is 256 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 259 as it looked roughly 256 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).