IC 2594

IC 2594 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Hydra about 173 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 84,000 ly, about 84% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,580 km/s.

Because its light is 173 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2594 as it looked roughly 173 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).